Kuwait's supreme court on Sunday (June 18th) reduced the death sentence of a citizen convicted of forming a pro-Iranian cell and of plotting attacks to life in prison, AFP reported.
Hasan Abdulhadi Ali was sentenced to death by the lower and appeals courts last year after he was convicted of being "the mastermind of a cell" of 26 individuals accused of links to Iran and of plotting attacks in the emirate.
Members of the cell had been charged with spying for Iran and hiding large quantities of arms, explosives and ammunition in underground warehouses.
Ali was also found guilty of having been an operative of Lebanon's Hizbullah movement since 1996 and of smuggling significant amounts of arms and explosives from Iran into Kuwait.
The supreme court judges, whose rulings are final, sentenced 20 other members of the cell to between five and 15 years in jail and acquitted two.
The cases of the remaining three members were not taken up by the supreme court because they remain fugitives.
They include the only Iranian member of the cell, Abdulredha Haider, who was handed the death penalty in absentia by the lower court in January last year.
The court had accused Haider of ties to Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and of recruiting the Kuwaitis and facilitating their travel to Lebanon, where they received military training from Iran-backed Hizbullah.
The 23 defendants present at the trial have denied the charges and said that their confessions were extracted under torture.
Iran has denied any links to the group.
