Mohammed Adam Omar | Murderpedia, the encyclopedia of murderers

When death came to Mohammed Adam Omar Ishaak, it was as cruel and grisly as the legend built around him at a sensational trial last autumn, when he was convicted of raping, killing and dismembering two female medical students at the University of Sana.

With his execution on a plot of open ground on this city's outskirts this summer, Mr. Omar, a Sudanese morgue attendant, returned to the front pages of newspapers across the Arab world. From his arrest 18 months ago, the 49-year-old man exercised a ghoulish fascination for millions of readers, who came to know him by his tabloid nickname, ''the Sana Ripper.''

But much about the trial, including curious shifts in the prosecution's case at the trial, and Mr. Omar's frustrated efforts to offer a version of events different from that of the prosecution, worried many Yemenis. A common view, voiced widely in Sana's bazaars, was that Mr. Omar may have been the scapegoat in a wider sex-and-murder scandal, possibly involving dozens of murders, that might have involved powerful figures protected at the trial.

So when Mr. Omar was led out to the execution ground on June 22, before a crowd estimated by witnesses at more than 30,000 people, there was a widespread sense among ordinary Yemenis that the last chance of learning the truth was about to die with him. Was Mr. Omar a solitary, heavy-drinking, woman-stalking psychotic, as the prosecution charged? Or was he a lowly, barely literate fall guy in a coverup of a high-level prostitution ring?

The most widespread theory among those who doubted the prosecution's case against Mr. Omar was that the medical school morgue may have been accustomed to disposing of the bodies of young women who had somehow become victims in a scandal involving exclusive brothels in Sana. That such brothels exist in Yemen, as they do in many countries in the Middle East, is not seriously disputed; nor is the fact that they often enjoy high-level protection.

For its part, the government of President Ali Abdullah Saleh, and senior officials at the medical school, vigorously denied from the outset that there was anything amiss with the trial. Senior government officials, before and after the execution, noted that Yemen has a long history of high-level intrigue that gives currency to virtually any rumor floated in the bazaars -- however bizarre -- and, crucially, that Mr. Omar pleaded guilty at his trial.

But such reassurances cut little ice. ''Sana Ripper Gone Forever!'' declared a headline in The Yemen Times, an English-language newspaper published in the Yemeni capital, one of several newspapers here that routinely challenge the government on sensitive issues, often provoking crackdowns. ''The general belief among the public is there are partners and motivations for committing these crimes, and those partners may amazingly be among the highest classes of the society,'' the newspaper said.

In its verdict in November, a Sana court ordered that Mr. Omar's sentence be carried out at the medical school, before a gathering of the faculty and students. In the end, this was modified, so that the event was staged outside the school's gates.

According to Yemenis who witnessed the execution, Mr. Omar, 49, was forced to kneel by the soldiers who formed the execution squad, then pushed face down onto the bare ground, before being lashed 80 times across his back with a whip of knotted leather. The additional punishment was ordered after Mr. Omar admitted at his trial to having drunk alcohol -- a common practice among Yemenis in the privacy of their homes, but a serious offense under Shariah, the Islamic legal code enforced in Yemeni courts.

After the lashes, with Mr. Omar still lying prone, a police officer braced himself with his legs either side of the condemned man, and fired three rounds from a Kalashnikov assault rifle aimed vertically his upper back, at a point calculated to penetrate his heart, according to Yemenis who witnessed the execution. When Mr. Omar continued to move, the officer fired again, this time at his head. His body was taken to a secret burial place undisclosed even to his family.

Yemeni newspapers reported that Mr. Omar made a last, unsuccessful appeal to be allowed to make a statement about the morgue killings as he was led, head erect and hands cuffed behind his back, to the execution ground.

According to Mr. Omar's lawyer, Mohammed Ali al-Khatib, this continued a pattern set early in the case. Mr. Khatib, a law professor at the University of Sana, recalled in an interview at his home that Mr. Omar was given only one chance to make a statement of his own, away from police and prosecutors, and that this came during a preliminary stage of the trial last year, when Mr. Khatib was allowed to see Mr. Omar in prison.

But even that meeting was short, Mr. Khatib said, when officials from the Political Security Organization, a shadowy agency widely feared in Yemen, overheard Mr. Omar saying he wanted to give a version of the killings different from the account of the prosecution. The officials abruptly ended the encounter. ''We had five or six minutes together, no more,'' Mr. Khatib said. ''And that was the last time I was ever able to speak to him alone.''

Abrupt changes in the prosecution's case fed rumors of a coverup.

Originally, the prosecution presented a confession by Mr. Omar saying he had killed 51 women during years of working around the Arab world. As inconsistencies came to light, the state shifted, saying there had been only 16 victims, all in Yemen, and that Mr. Omar had only ever worked previously in his native Sudan, as a Khartoum hospital gravedigger.

Finally, that version, too, was abandoned, and Mr. Omar was charged at the trial with the murder of only two women, both medical students, one Yemeni and one Iraqi, pieces of whose bodies were found in the morgue's drains.

The families of both women want the case reopened. But the government has refused, saying its own review showed Mr. Omar acted alone. Yemen's new foreign minister, Dr. Abubaker al-Qirbi, an endocrinologist who was the founding dean of the medical school in the early 1980's, was sharply critical of the school during the trial for its lax procedures, particularly for failing to keep accurate records of cadavers used in its dissecting rooms. But in an interview, Dr. Qirbi said that it was time to move on. ''It's a closed issue,'' he said.

This argument carries little weight with Mr. Khatib, the lawyer. ''I believe we will ultimately know the truth, with the passage of time, and my personal belief is that when we do we will finally know that Mohammed Adam Omar never killed anybody,'' he said.