Kuwaiti court reprieve for Iran spy

‘Mastermind’ will not face execution

KUWAIT CITY // Kuwait’s supreme court yesterday commuted the death sentence of a citizen convicted of forming a pro-Iranian cell and plotting attacks to life in prison.

Hasan Abdulhadi Ali was sentenced to death by the lower and appeals courts last year after he was found guilty of being “the mastermind of a cell” of 26 Shiites accused of links to Iran and of plotting attacks in Kuwait. Members of the cell had been charged with spying for Iran and hiding caches of arms.

Ali was also found guilty of having been an operative of Hizbollah since 1996 and of smuggling arms and explosives from Iran into Kuwait. The supreme court judges, whose rulings are final, sentenced 20 other members of the cell to between five and 15 years in jail and acquitted two.

The cases of the remaining three were not heard as they are fugitives. They include the only Iranian member of the cell, Abdulredha Haider, who was sentenced to death in his absence by the lower court last year.

Haider was accused of ties to Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guard and of recruiting the Kuwaiti Shiites and helping them to Lebanon for training from Iranbacked Hizbollah.

The 23 defendants at trial denied the charges and said their confessions were extracted under torture.

Iran denied links to the group.