Germany Extradites Yemeni Terror Suspects to U.S.

On Sunday, the prosecutor’s office in Frankfurt am Main announced that a Yemeni cleric with suspected al Qaeda links and his assistant had been extradited to the United States for a hearing on their involvement in the Oct. 2000 attack on the USS Cole naval destroyer. Mohammad Ali Hassan Sheikh al-Moayad, imam of the main mosque in the Yemeni capital Sanaa, and Yahya Zayed were arrested in an FBI undercover sting in Germany last January and have been held since then on charges of raising funds for the terror network al Qaeda and the militant Palestinian group Hamas. Moayad is said to have been a finance chief for the two organizations and is thought to have supplied both with weapons and communications equipment. A spokeswoman for the prosecutor’s office said the extradition was only permitted under the condition that the two men would not be sentenced to death or tried before a military court.