Al-Qaida leader’s wife gets 20 years in prison

Hasna Ali Yahya, the Yemeni wife of Abu Ayyub al-Masri, was convicted last Thrusday by an Iraqi court to 20 years in prison on terrorism related charges, according to Iraqi Supreme Judicial Council spokesman Abdul-Sattar Bayrkdar.

Mr. Bayrkdar did not give much detail on her conviction but a government official said that she was convicted on her correspondence between insurgents and preparing explosive-laden belts. Since April 2010, joint U.S.-Iraqi north of Baghdad killed al-Masri along with another prominent al-Qaida in Iraq militant and the mother of three has been in custody since then.

Iraq’s al-Qaida umbrella group, the Islamic State of Iraq threatened to kidnap family members of Iraqi politicians and ministers if al-Masri’s wife and children were not released after six months. According to a Yemeni diplomat, the two daughters and son were handed over to their uncle in Yemen. Al-Masri, an Eygyptian joined al-Qaida camps in Afghanistan in the late 1990s and was trained as a car bomb expert. In June 2006, he was killed after having led the terror organization after Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian-born founder of Al-Qaida in Iraq.

Report by Sumit