Qatari prime minister was guest at wedding with man on terrorist list
Qatar’s prime minister attended the wedding of a man whose father was put on the country’s terrorism list last month.
Photos of the wedding were published days ago in Qatari newspaper Al Raya, showing Sheikh Abdullah bin Nasser Al Thani, the Prime Minister and Interior Minister, fondly greeting Abdullah Al Nuaimi.
In the background, smiling, is his father Abdulrahman Al Nuaimi, a former head of the Qatar Football Association, who was designated by the US and UN for financing Al Qaeda in Iraq.
The wedding page photographs also show father and son with former Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal, who has been living in Qatar for more than a decade.
The images provoked outrage on social media and among security experts, who called into question Qatar’s commitment to tackling terrorist suspects and those who finance extremism.
Terrorism expert David Weinberg tweeted: “It’s hard to know what’s worse: that Nuaimi was free to attend his son’s wedding weeks after being designated a terrorist by even his own government and months after Qatar told The New York Times he was in jail, or that it seems the party was attended and blessed by a top religion anchor for state media.”
As interior minister, Sheikh Abdullah was responsible for issuing the list of 19 Qataris and others who were designated as terrorists by the country for the first time.
Last month’s announcement was presented by Doha as a major step to meet its undertakings to the US Treasury when the US and GCC Terrorist Finance Targeting Centre was set up last May.
Analysis published by Mr Weinberg said there were glaring omissions of Al Qaeda and ISIS from the list.
“Qatar is a founding member of the Global Coalition to Defeat Daesh, and yet its new list of banned terrorist groups still does not include ISIS’s central branch in Syria and Iraq,” he wrote.
“Only the group’s branch in the Sinai Peninsula is proscribed by Qatar’s new list, a significant omission given that ISIS branches and loyalists carried out attacks in over 20 countries in 2016 alone.
“Also excluded from the list is Muthanna Al Dhari, an Iraqi subject to a UN travel ban for allegedly funding ISIL’s forerunner, Al Qaeda in Iraq, to the tune of over $1 million.
“Al Dhari has been let into Qatar numerous times, including in the last year, and was hugged and kissed by Emir Tamim’s father in 2015.”
After Al Nuaimi was put on the US Treasury’s sanctions list on 2013, an activist group he founded in Geneva protested against the decision. According to its website, Al Karama rejects the designation.
“Al Karama’s executive director Mourad Dhina commented in an article, ‘The Arab world needs bridge building, not terrorist listing’, arguing that the US decision was not the way to go for advancing democracy in the region,” it said.
Al Karama had its special consultative status to the UN’s Economic and Social Council revoked last year after the controversy.
Terrorism experts question Doha’s commitment to tackling extremism