Print

Email story

Comment

Email editor

Bomb fax brings a chill to trial

The message praising a suicide bomber also recalls a father's pained testimony about his daughter's death.

By MEG LAUGHLIN
Published July 21, 2005

TAMPA - An old crime came back to haunt the trial of Sami Al-Arian and three other defendants Wednesday.

A month ago, a chilling moment in the trial occurred when the father of a 20-year-old American girl described her murder by a suicide bomber as she rode a public bus in the occupied territories. The explosion killed eight people near Kfar Darom on April 9, 1995.

That act resurfaced in court, this time in words glorifying the suicide bomber and praising the killings.

The troublesome twist took the form of a fax from Palestinian Islamic Jihad to Tampa on the day of the bombing. Prosecutors introduced it as evidence Wednesday.

The PIJ press release, with the group's logo, went to the home of Ramadan Shallah, one of Al-Arian's associates.

Shallah immediately faxed it to the Tampa office of WISE - the World and Islamic Studies Enterprise - a think tank Al-Arian set up when he was a University of South Florida professor.

The fax, written in Arabic and translated into English, begins: "The Islamic Jihad Movement in Palestine announces the death of its martyr the hero Khaled Al-Khatib, hero of the martyrdom operation of Kfar Darom."

Then a quotation from the Koran: "Think not of those who are slain in God's way as dead. Nay, they live, finding their sustenance in the presence of their Lord."

At the time he received the fax celebrating the killings, Shallah was working at WISE. Seven months later, he left Tampa for the Middle East and took over as head of PIJ.

The government got the fax by placing FBI wiretaps on the phones of Shallah and WISE. Authorities suspected both were linked to the PIJ.

Faxes such as this one, as well as phone conversations, hundreds of them from wiretaps on at least eight different phones, are the crux of the government's case against the defendants.

Al-Arian, Sameeh Hammoudeh, Hatem Fariz and Ghassan Ballut are on trial, accused of using Islamic charities as fronts in a conspiracy to finance terrorist attacks by the PIJ, which has claimed responsibility for killing more than 100 people in Israel and the occupied territories.

Shallah is one of five others listed as co-defendants but not yet in custody.

Stephen Flatow, father of the young American killed in the April 9, 1995, suicide bombing, told a stunned courtroom in mid June that he learned of the bombing at Kfar Darom from a phone call to the family's New Jersey home. His daughter, Alisa, who was studying in Israel, was on her way to a seaside resort when a man in a van, loaded with explosives, drove up beside the bus.

The father wept as he described flying all night to get to an Israeli hospital to be with his child: "I squeezed her hand. It fell limp to the side of the bed. Shrapnel had lacerated her brain," he said.

In its communique about the killing, introduced into evidence Wednesday, the PIJ says it is "cheerfully announcing the news of the martyrdom of its righteous son." It speaks of the "determination to continue on the road of jihad and martyrdom," and says that arrests (by the Israelis or the Palestinian Authority) "will only cause more fury and vigor."

It is not clear who at WISE received the fax. A former secretary for the organization testified in June that Al-Arian, while no longer working there, "visited from time to time." Defendant Sameeh Hammoudeh kept an office there. But there was nothing offered in court Wednesday to show that either man read the document.

U.S. District Judge James S. Moody has repeatedly told the jury that no evidence, to date, links the defendants directly to killings in Israel or the occupied territories, and that possession of materials, such as the faxed PIJ announcement, is not a crime.

They are being admitted into evidence, he explained, because prosecutors must show that defendants were knowledgeable of PIJ violent acts before they attempt to show that they raised money to encourage future PIJ violence.

In addition to the fax, federal prosecutor Cherie Krigsman entered a 3-inch stack of transcripts of other faxes, phone calls and videotapes. The conversations included all four defendants.

[Last modified July 21, 2005, 00:56:18]