A Kuwaiti was sentenced on Saturday to 10 years in prison for plotting to bomb the Israeli trade office in Doha, while his co-defendants were acquitted or placed under surveillance, court sources said.
The court in Kuwait City ordered eight defendants to pay a bail of $1,600 each and pledge good conduct, placing them under police surveillance for two years.
Another seven of the accused were acquitted.
Mohammad Abdullah Al Dosari, who was arrested last November and charged with heading the group, told the court in February that he had been forced by the intelligence services to confess to the anti-Israeli bomb plot.
Dosari confessed to hiding unlicensed arms, including explosives, detonators, rocket launchers, assault rifles, hand grenades, handguns and ammunition, saying it belonged to a member of the ruling family.
But the man in question, Sheikh Athbi Al Sabah, denied the charges in court.
Among the accused were five army officers, two policemen, two professors of Islamic studies at Kuwait University, and a suspect who was arrested in Qatar during an Islamic summit in November and extradited to Kuwait.
Local newspaper reports had said Dosari belonged to a militant Islamic group linked to Saudi dissident Osama bin Laden, which was plotting attacks on US targets in the Gulf.
The group's suspected mastermind, a Moroccan, fled Kuwait, allegedly to Iran, using a fake Saudi passport. Kuwait asked Tehran for his extradition, but he was not indicted.
One week before the arrests, US forces in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait were put on the highest security alert because of a "credible threat" of attacks following the bombing of the US destroyer Cole in the Yemeni port of Aden.
Kuwaiti security forces seized 133 kilograms (293 pounds) of powerful explosives, 1,450 detonators, several RPGs, Kalashnikov assault rifles, hand grenades, hand guns and ammunition from the group.
The indictment did not specify the source of the arms, but at least some were believed to be weapons left behind by retreating Iraqi troops in 1991 -- KUWAIT CITY (AFP)
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