LONDON - For the second time in a matter of months, a state security court in Jordan on Wednesday acquitted a militant Islamic cleric known as Abu Qatada on terrorism charges, a dramatic reversal of his fortunes following an earlier death sentence.
Judges said there was insufficient evidence against him, news reports said. The Associated Press quoted his defense lawyer as saying he expects him to be freed within hours.
His acquittal came after he and another militant cleric known as Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi, whose real name is Mohammed al-Barqawi, condemned the Islamic State, the militant Sunni group often referred to as ISIS, which broke away from Al Qaeda and is now seeking to extend its authority in Syria and Iraq, igniting concerns that it could spread chaos in Jordan, too.
Jordan is one of five Arab nations that joined the United States in bombing Islamic State targets in Syria early on Tuesday.
The 54-year-old cleric, whose real name is Omar Mahmoud Mohammed Othman, faced accusations relating to a plot to bomb Israeli, American and other Western tourists at millennium celebrations in 2000. In June he was acquitted on separate charges of planning to carry out a terror attack on the American school in Amman.
He had denied all the charges. British officials have said that they will resist his return to Britain, where he spent many years in exile and where he is still subject to a deportation order.
Supporters of the cleric are likely to cast the latest ruling as a final vindication of his longstanding protestations of innocence.
The case has its origins in two trials held in Jordan in 1999 and 2000, when Mr. Othman, a Jordanian citizen of Palestinian descent, had already secured asylum in Britain. As efforts continued to deport him to Jordan, the cleric was imprisoned or held under restrictions amounting to house arrest in Britain for several years, resisting his expulsion for years by arguing that a retrial in Jordan would be based on evidence obtained under duress.
In the first case, in 1999, Mr. Othman was sentenced to death in his absence for what prosecutors called the plot on the Amman school, a judgment that was later reduced to life imprisonment. In the second, he was sentenced to 15 years in prison for involvement in the alleged plot to attack tourists.
After Jordan and Britain agreed to a treaty last year to forbid the use of evidence obtained by torture in a retrial, he was deported. Britain celebrated his departure as a turning point in its struggle against Islamic ideology linked to Al Qaeda.
Mr. Othman, a father of five, fled to Britain and won the right to remain there in 1993 when he sought asylum, saying that he had been tortured in Jordan. He was subsequently sought by the authorities in nine countries, including the United States.
Western European intelligence agencies have accused Mr. Othman of having links to senior Qaeda officials. German security officials have said that tapes of Mr. Othman's sermons were found in apartments in Hamburg that were used by some of those involved in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States. A Spanish judge called him Osama bin Laden's 'right-hand man in Europe.'
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