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 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, 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.
