3 Lebanese Arrive in Beirut after UAE Frees Them

Three Lebanese citizens arrived late Sunday at Beirut’s Rafik Hariri International Airport after being released from UAE prisons, Lebanon’s National News Agency reported.

NNA identified the trio as Mohsen Qansou, Ali Fawwaz and Jihad Fawwazeddine.

They had been arrested last year along with several Lebanese nationals on charges of forming a “terrorist cell.”

On May 15, an Emirati court sentenced one of them to life imprisonment and two compatriots to 10 years in prison on charges of planning attacks for the Lebanese group Hizbullah, Amnesty International said.

Amnesty said five other Lebanese defendants, all of them Shiite Muslims, were acquitted of the charge of planning to carry out attacks for the Iran-backed Shiite militant group.

"The absence of basic requirements of a fair trial, such as having access to a lawyer, strips today's verdict of any reliability or credibility," said Lynn Maalouf, Amnesty's Middle East research head.

"The eight men were held in solitary confinement for over a year -- this in itself can amount to torture. They were denied access to lawyers during the pre-trial interrogation," she said in a statement.

The accused were residents of the United Arab Emirates for more than 15 years, seven of them as employees of Dubai-based airline Emirates.

They were arrested between December 2017 and February 2018 and put on trial under terrorism charges.

The UAE, a close ally of Iran's regional rival and Sunni powerhouse Saudi Arabia, classifies Hizbullah as a "terrorist organization".