Mohammed Adam Omar, a Sudanese national, was executed in Sanaa, Yemen, on June 20, 2001, before a crowd reported at about 50,000. He had been convicted of two murders, those of Zainab Saud Aziz in December 1999 and Hosn Ahmed Attiya in February 2000, together with kidnapping and rape. The two women died in separate events two months apart. At the time he worked at the Sanaa University faculty of medicine.
Omar's case drew attention far beyond the two convictions. In May 2000, a few days after his arrest, he told a court and a Yemeni newspaper that he had killed 16 women in Yemen, and then gave accounts of killings in Sudan and other countries. He withdrew most of this at trial. The Yemeni authorities charged him with two murders, and those are the only killings for which any court found him guilty. The rest remained confessions that he retracted, and they were never tried.
The details of Omar's life are uncertain. The Agence France-Presse report carried by Al Bawaba in May 2000 named him Mohammad Adam Omar Ishaak and gave his age as 52. Brian Whitaker, writing for al-bab.com in June 2000, gave it as 45, and another Al Bawaba report put it at 53. He was Sudanese. According to the AFP report he arrived in Yemen about two years before the first killing he described, had a Yemeni wife, and had a son and a daughter by a divorced Sudanese woman. He worked at the Sanaa University faculty of medicine. Whitaker reported that the university had dismissed him for bribery in December 1999 and later reinstated him.
Zainab Saud Aziz was an Iraqi national. Gulf News, in a 2019 account based on interviews with her family, said her relatives lived in Ras Al Khaimah in the United Arab Emirates, and that her mother, Karimah Motlak, refused to accept the first explanations offered about her daughter's fate. The Yemen Times placed her death in December 1999.
Her mother pressed the Yemeni police to look further. Gulf News reported that police had questioned Omar and another Sudanese man and released both for lack of evidence, and that she insisted on further inquiries. Her uncle, who traveled to Sanaa, was held for a time without charge, according to the same account. Her family also pursued a civil claim: at a hearing in the summer of 2000 their lawyer sought $2 million in compensation from the university for alleged negligence, Al Bawaba reported in August 2000.
The Yemen Times reported in July 2000 that her family's lawyer had challenged the way German forensic experts were chosen by the prosecutor and questioned discrepancies between their findings and those of the Yemeni investigators.
Hosn Ahmed Attiya was a Yemeni woman from the Hamdan tribe. The Yemen Times, reporting on the court hearing of July 2000, wrote that her father died about ten months after her death, from the effects of grief, and that her mother was reported to have lost her sight for a time.
Her tribe turned the case into a public cause. Members of the Hamdan tribe shouted at the public prosecutor at the hearing on June 3, 2000, accusing him of a cover-up, and left the court with their lawyers, according to the AFP report carried by Al Bawaba. A tribal leader, Sheikh Ali Yahya A'idh, told the Yemen Times that tribal leaders from several tribes had written letters supporting the family, and warned that the tribe would act under its own custom if the courts failed to deliver justice. The family asked for the investigation reports, for the prosecution of accomplices and of university staff, and for penalties for guards and officers who had misled them. Whether any of these demands was met is not on record.
The Yemen Times placed her death in February 2000.
The inquiry that led to Omar followed the persistence of the families. By the account Gulf News gave in 2019, Zainab Saud Aziz's mother pressed the police to extend their inquiries after Omar had been questioned once and released. In May 2000 Omar was arrested at the university. Whitaker wrote that a technician at the university was arrested within days of the police first acting.
The authorities moved against the university's leadership. The faculty's dean and his deputy were suspended and the head of university security was dismissed, according to the AFP report of May 29, 2000, and Whitaker added that the Prime Minister ordered the suspensions. On May 28, 2000, more than 10,000 people marched from the university to the presidential palace under police escort, Al Bawaba reported. They demanded a wider inquiry, the arrest of accomplices and trials of university officials. One marcher told the reporter that a single man could not have operated unnoticed for five years.
Whitaker reported that three university staff members, a Yemeni, an Iraqi and a Sudanese, were arrested after Omar named them. None of them is recorded as tried or convicted.
Omar's trial opened on Saturday, May 27, 2000, before a court in Sanaa presided over by Judge Yahya al-Aslami. AFP called the court the north Sanaa criminal court, while the Yemen Times named the Bani Hareth Court of First Instance. At the opening he confessed to 16 killings of young women in Yemen. AFP reported that he placed them between November 1995 and January 2000, and that the next day he also said he had killed 11 women in Sudan between 1976 and 1981, when he worked at Khartoum University. Police said he had left further victims in Kuwait, Lebanon, Chad and the Central African Republic, though his confessions gave no figures. In a May 18 interview with a Yemeni newspaper, according to AFP, he said he had lost count, and local papers spoke of more than 50 victims. He told the court he had acted alone, but the court ordered an inquiry into possible accomplices.
On the second day his confessions were read out, and he said, "I admit all these facts." His defense lawyer, Mohammad al-Khatib, then withdrew, saying his conscience would not permit him to continue. No other Yemeni lawyer would take the case, and Omar spoke for himself.
The confession fell apart on June 3, 2000. A woman whom the press had listed among the dead appeared in court and said she had learned of it from the newspapers. Whitaker added that other women named as victims turned up alive, and that a journalist doubted one of the appearances. Omar told the judge that he had killed only two women, Hosn Attiya and Zainab Saud. Asked why he had lied, he said he was not sure.
The interior ministry had already said, on May 19, 2000, that he would face charges for two murders only. Judge al-Aslami reopened all the investigations and summoned the medical experts in the case. Why Omar made the original confession is not on record.
The trial resumed after a one-month break. At the July 5, 2000 hearing, the Yemen Times wrote, the mood was one of disappointment among the victims' families at how little had been done. Zainab's lawyer objected to how the German experts had been appointed. Judge al-Aslami found the translation of the German report careless and ordered it redone at an official center. The court assigned a police general to have the findings examined by forensic experts in Germany.
Al Bawaba, reporting on August 5, 2000, said that preliminary findings had reached the court and the full report was still two weeks away. At the session after the break, Omar confirmed that he had killed Zainab. His lawyer's request for psychiatric tests was refused. The judge ordered the university president and the dean of the faculty of medicine to appear at the next hearing, on August 12.
Omar was sentenced to death on November 19, 2000, according to Amnesty International's urgent action of January 3, 2001. Amnesty reported that he was found guilty of kidnapping, rape and murder, on two counts of murder after the charges were reduced. The Yemen Times, reporting on the appeal in April 2001, named the two victims and the months of the killings: Zainab Saud Aziz, an Iraqi woman, in December 1999, and Hosn Ahmed Attiya, a Yemeni woman, in February 2000. The two deaths were therefore separate events.
The Appeal Court of Sanaa upheld the death sentence in the first week of April 2001, rejecting the defense lawyer's appeal. It ordered the public treasury to pay five million Yemeni rials to each victim's family. The Yemen Times reported that Omar had repeatedly asked the authorities to carry out the sentence quickly.
Amnesty International said in January 2001 that his final appeal was before the Supreme Court and that he might be executed within days if it was rejected. It described serious concerns about the fairness of the proceedings, noting that his confession to 16 murders had been retracted after an alleged victim appeared in court. In its update of June 20, 2001, Amnesty recorded that the Supreme Court had upheld the sentence and that President Ali Abdullah Saleh had approved it. A Gulf News report in 2019 said the president had ordered the execution to be carried out without delay.
Omar was executed on Wednesday, June 20, 2001, in a public square in Sanaa. The Yemen Times, in its issue of June 25, 2001, put the crowd at about 50,000 and said members of the victims' families were present. Before the execution he was given 80 lashes under a separate sentence, as the Yemen Times and Al Bawaba both reported. Al-bab.com and the Yemen Times also reported that he left a will, which he asked to be read 40 days after his death. Its contents are not on record.
The Yemen Times wrote after the execution that the identity of his partners remained unresolved. A Gulf News report of July 2019, written years after the event, recorded that the family of Zainab Saud Aziz said they had not been invited to the execution, that a request to postpone it had been refused, and that they were offered a video recording instead. This differs from the Yemen Times report that members of the victims' families attended.
The only deaths for which a court convicted Omar are those of Zainab Saud Aziz and Hosn Ahmed Attiya. Everything else rests on statements that he made and withdrew.
In May 2000 he confessed to 16 murders in Yemen between November 1995 and January 2000. On June 3, 2000 he retracted most of this, and the interior ministry had already limited the charges to two.
He told the court he had killed 11 women in Sudan between 1976 and 1981, according to AFP. No Sudanese charge or proceeding is on record.
Police told AFP that he had left victims in Kuwait, Lebanon, Chad and the Central African Republic. His confessions gave no figures, and no proceeding in those countries is on record.
Whitaker reported that several women listed by the press as victims turned out to be alive, and German experts were commissioned by the court to establish how many people had died. The court had announced no total.
No court found any of these claims proved.
Several points remain in dispute. The date of sentence is November 19, 2000 in Amnesty International's appeal; Gulf News gave November 28. Omar's age ranged from 45 to 53 in different reports. The Al Bawaba report of the execution said the death sentence was passed in November 1999 and described a six-month trial; the dates of the arrest and trial rule that out. The court is variously named. And in 2019 a relative of Zainab Saud Aziz suggested to Gulf News that another man had been executed in Omar's place. The relative offered no evidence for it, and the Yemen Times and Amnesty reported the execution of Omar.
The case led to the suspension of the faculty's dean and deputy and the dismissal of the university's security chief in May 2000. The families of both women pursued civil claims and demands for further prosecutions. The Hamdan tribe pressed its demands through the court and through tribal leaders. By the time of the execution, no accomplice had been convicted, and Omar's will was to be read 40 days later.
December 1999: Zainab Saud Aziz killed (court record as reported by the Yemen Times).
February 2000: Hosn Ahmed Attiya killed.
May 2000: Omar arrested at Sanaa University.
May 19, 2000: interior ministry says he faces charges for two murders.
May 27, 2000: trial opens; he confesses to 16 murders in Yemen.
May 28, 2000: more than 10,000 people march in Sanaa demanding a wider inquiry.
June 3, 2000: he retracts most of the confession after an alleged victim appears in court.
July 5 and August 2000: hearings on the German forensic findings; he confirms he killed Zainab Saud Aziz.
November 19, 2000: sentenced to death.
Early April 2001: Appeal Court of Sanaa upholds the sentence.
June 2001: Supreme Court upholds the sentence; the President approves it.
June 20, 2001: Omar executed in Sanaa.