The United Arab Emirates’ top prosecutor referred 41 people to trial on charges of planning to carry out terrorist acts with the aim of overthrowing the government and establishing an extremist state, according to a statement released Sunday.
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“The defendants were charged with setting up and running a terrorist organisation named Shabab Al Manarah, “The Minaret’s Youths”, which upholds terrorist thought with the intent to commit terrorist acts inside the country and endanger its security and peace and lives of its people, including their leaders”, Kubaish said in a statement carried by WAM. He was also to decide on the duties and roles of each committee and cell, and to lay down the overall policy and goals of the group and ways of achieving them as well as ways of communicating with foreign armed groups, providing the necessary funds and preparing plans and objectives.
Known as Operation Inherent Resolve, the U.S.-led coalition began hitting IS forces with airstrikes last year after the extremists declared a caliphate in swaths of land they captured in Iraq and Syria. Hashemi’s execution was the first in the oil-rich Muslim federation since January 2014 when a Sri Lankan was put to death by firing squad for murdering an Emirati man in 2006.
It is the latest in a series of trials against Islamists in the UAE. In 2013, it sentenced more than 60 people to jail for links to Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood. Human rights groups have raised concerns that the blacklist is intended to stamp down on even peaceful dissent.
The Brotherhood is one of dozens of Islamist-inspired groups outlawed in the UAE in a blacklist that extends far beyond the jihadists of IS and Al-Qaeda.
The Sawab Centre, launched last month by the UAE and the US, works to counter the Daesh group’s narrative by promoting tolerant voices from the region.
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The move comes less than a week after two police officers died in a bomb attack in the Gulf Arab nation of Bahrain, and it follows recent suicide attacks that have been claimed by the Islamic State against mosques in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait.
