Amman (AsiaNews/Compass) - An Amman Islamic court ruled in favour of Christian widow Siham Qandah, revoking legal custody from her children's Muslim uncle and ordering him to repay misspent funds withdrawn from their orphan trust accounts.

Judge Mahmud Zghl handed down his verdict in Amman's Al-Abdali Sharia Court against Abdullah al-Muhtadi, who has been fighting a seven-year legal battle to wrest custody of his underage niece and nephew from their Christian mother.

The former guardian has the right to appeal the judgment within 30 days.

"I still can't believe it!" Qandah said, laughing and crying. "I am so happy; I am just speechless. I can't even describe my emotions."

Although she had already called her children from Amman, she said she could not wait to travel back home to Husn and tell them in person.

Now 16 and 15, Qandah's daughter Rawan and son Fadi lost their father 11 years ago, when he died as a soldier in the U.N. peacekeeping forces in Kosovo. But when their mother went to claim their army orphan benefits, a local court produced an unsigned "conversion" certificate, claiming that her Christian husband had secretly converted to Islam three years before his death.

The certificate could not be contested under Islamic law, so Qandah was forced to find a Muslim to handle financial matters for the children. Despite their baptism as Christians, both were automatically declared Muslims under the dictums of Islamic law.

Al-Muhtadi, the widow's estranged brother who had converted to Islam as a teenager, agreed to serve as their legal Muslim guardian.

But over the next few years, he began pocketing some of the children's monthly benefits, and later withdrew nearly half of their U.N.-allocated trust funds by obtaining signed approvals from highly placed Islamic court judges.

Then in 1998, he filed suit to take custody of the children away from their Christian mother in order to raise them as Muslims. After a four-year court wrangle, Jordan's Supreme Islamic Court ruled in his favor, ordering Qandah to give her children over to al-Muhtadi's custody.

Over the past three years, Qandah has been forced into hiding several times to avoid possible arrest and separation from her children.

But after Qandah's case attracted international press coverage, King Abdullah II and other members of the Jordanian royal family began to monitor judicial handling of the case, pledging that the children would not be taken away from their mother.