“Judge Hisham Abdullah issued the verdict to acquit the six defendants of all charges. They will be released from detention today,” Mohamed al-Kundari said of suspects who had appeared in court.
Five of the men were arrested in August last year while the sixth suspect is already serving a life term in jail for a 2002 attack on the US military in Kuwait that killed an American soldier.
They were charged with plotting to attack the US military base at Arifjan, 70km south of Kuwait City.
They have categorically denied the charges and claimed their confessions were extracted through torture. Two other Kuwaitis who were being tried in absentia were also acquitted by the criminal court, Kundari said.
The two are Mohsen al-Fadhli, who has been wanted by Kuwaiti security forces for the past five years, and Mohamed al-Dossari who is on trial in Lebanon in connection with terror charges, he added.
“It was an expected ruling,” said Kundari, who along with other defence lawyers argued during the trial that the public prosecution and investigators had failed to provide the court any material evidence.
At the start of the trial in December, the public prosecution dropped the key conspiracy charge but pressed other accusations of planning to manufacture explosives and the illegal possession of firearms.
In February, however, a secret service officer told the court that the six defendants plotted to attack the US base in Arifjan in collaboration with the other two suspects.
A US defence department spokesman said last year US forces in Kuwait had been targeted but that it was unclear if the suspects were linked to Al Qaeda or planned to strike Camp Arifjan.
The prosecution can still appeal the verdict, and generally does appeal in cases linked to Islamist militancy. The ruling by a criminal court was issued without immediate explanation.
“This is good news, there was no evidence against them,” liberal analyst Shamlan al-Eissa said. He said the government should concentrate more on fighting the culture of religious extremism in Kuwait, which he said was at the root of militancy.
“Fighting terrorism should be by spreading freedoms, encouraging arts and artists, the theatre and music,” he said.
Kuwait waged a largely successful campaign to stamp out violence by Islamist militants after the September 11, 2001 attacks on US cities and the Iraq war.
Camp Arifjan serves as a staging ground for troops serving in Iraq. Kuwait’s position as a key US ally in the region was cemented after the 1991 Gulf War that liberated it from a seven-month Iraqi occupation under Saddam Hussain.
Kuwait was later the launch pad of the US-led invasion of Iraq that toppled Saddam in 2003.
About 15,000 US soldiers are stationed in Kuwait.
Some Islamists oppose the American military presence in Kuwait, and the US military has occasionally been the target of Al Qaeda-inspired attacks, including a raid that killed one US Marine and wounded another in October 2002.
When Kuwaiti authorities announced the arrests in August, a security official said the group also planned to attack the country’s Shuaiba oil refinery. However, the court did not charge them on any counts related to that facility.
In a separate case, Kuwait said earlier this month that authorities had detained several people in a security probe, following media reports that a number of Kuwaitis and foreigners were being held on suspicion of spying on military installations for Iran.
