GARETH PEIRCE, THE SOLICITOR OF DEFENDANTS
SAMAR ALAMI and JAWAD BOTMEH

There are many cases of people wrongly convicted where I have been to meetings and there's perhaps two people there, and in fact some 10 years later there have been a few more. It's important, and I thank you for being already aware that something is very wrong here.

It is correct that I have represented many people over the years who have been wrongly convicted. The majority of those people are people whose trials I was not involved in at the beginning and became involved later, and attempted to have their case re-opened, and sometimes after more than one appeal that happened.

What I realised after the end of this case is that I never, or almost never have been involved in a trial which ended in a conviction where I am certain, completely certain, that the defendants are wholly innocent, and are wholly wholly wrongly convicted. Maybe one's experience as a defence lawyer in that regard is primarily in Magistrates' Courts where there is a very high conviction rate, and where particularly in demonstration cases there are wrongful convictions, but they don't usually end in imprisonment and the experience is not so painful. But at the end of this case I felt feelings that I have not experienced before save in the context of bereavement.

There was something so terrible and so enormous and so seemingly final where a case had been fought - where it wasn't a situation that one had gone into unaware that there were difficulties, and it wasn't a case where one had ignored evidence or failed to see obstacles ahead. But at the end of it, despite every intense effort that had been made by the defendants - and those efforts involved in my view enormous courage in exposing themselves as they did to the court, to the jury and to the entire world in talking about thoughts and actions that they have been involved in that led to their situation in the eyes of the prosecution. Despite all of that, there has been a truly terrible result.

In cases in which I have been involved where I have known that people have been wrongly convicted, often one looks back at the trial and can easily analyse what went wrong. Perhaps there was a wrong forensic interpretation; perhaps people had been brutalised by police and made confessions of things they hadn't done. But the complexity of the evidence in this case, and the difficulties that had been faced by both the defendants and the jury, make it very hard to disentangle and to analyse precisely why these two people came to be convicted.

Part of analysing other cases affects how one tackles cases in the present day. A lot of the analysis of cases that have gone wrong in the past involves an understanding that if you are innocent of the charge you are often the person who is least equipped to defend yourself.

The case that was mentioned a moment ago - a man who was wrongly convicted of the Guildford pub bombings: in the course of trying to get his case re-opened, I came to interview the people who had committed those bombings who were and are in prison in England for other offences, but the authorities have continuously refused to charge them with the Guildford bombings. One of the comments that those perpetrators of the bombings made to me was that at the time of the trial of the four wrongly accused defendants, they had been amazed to listen and to read and to watch how the evidence proceeded, and also amazed at the points that were not taken by the defence. The matters they seemingly overlooked, and the clues they seemed to ignore, pointed in a wholly different direction.

But there is a vast difference between knowing something, and not knowing what you don't know. What happened here that led to the arrests of Samar and Jawad was clearly that there was a chemical engineer and an electronics engineer whose paths had crossed with a person who is either directly involved in the bombing of the Israeli embassy, or who was himself indirectly involved and made use of, no doubt willingly, by other persons.

There is clear evidence of those other persons. There is clear evidence of a team consisting of at least one person who may or may not have been a middle-aged woman, but certainly had the appearance of one. That team and that individual was present at, party to, and responsible for the bombing of the Israeli embassy. We have direct immediate witness testimony to that, and we have direct immediate testimony to the fact that another person (a man) was involved in the buying of the cars that were used in the bombing of the embassy.

Those people have gone. They have never been traced, and there is no clue to their whereabouts. There is no clue as to why they did it, on whose behalf they did it and with whose help they did it.
There is no clue as to where they came from, and there is no clue as to where they are now. They vanished without trace. If we hadn't got the direct testimony of prosecution witnesses we would never know they existed. All that is left is two people whose paths one of these persons had crossed, and who were left unprotected, exposed, unprotectful of themselves because they didn't know they were exposed and didn't know their paths had crossed. There is no other explanation; there is no other explanation but that both of them are totally innocent.

My contact with people I represent is clearly close and intense and of long duration, and I appreciate that's different from any other person's contact. It is different from what the jury knows or is allowed to know. It is because in part that the way in which I came to know how they explained what they explained, why they explained what little they did, that I am totally a 100% sure as any person I have ever represented that these two have no involvement whatsoever in the bombing of the Israeli embassy.

You can't be involved and not know what you did on the day of the bombing. And why not know? I mean, why not know that you have a complete alibi that would prove where you were. That you could prove that at important and central times that you were no way near it? It's only in the course of what came to be almost two years of unravelling what happened that day, that proof that each in turn, separately and individually, had forgotten what had happened on that day became clear and apparent. They could not possibly, they could not possibly be involved in something as extraordinary as that action on that day and not be aware (as one of the defendants) that he was in fact in Brighton with his brother and a host of witnesses.

Equally you could not be aware, as one of the other defendants, that she was in a library making a telephone call to an aunt at the time of the bombing, and only find out by a process of reconstruction years later that by chance the telephone booth in the library records all calls lasting more than 10 minutes. BT still has the record of it.

These are just tiny fragments and perhaps mean more to me than they do to you. But if someone is guilty and putting forward a false defence, you could be very sure that the first thing they would mention to you was that they had an alibi. The last thing to happen would be that they wouldn't remember.

But perhaps the more important thing was the intense internal personal debate each of the two had to decide to give evidence to the jury, because that decision involved what to them was a total exposure of what they thought hitherto were private and secret and deeply deeply damaging thoughts. They've each come from different directions, and have conducted and talked about experimenting with defensive measures in resistance to Israeli occupation. Again in a way that is ironic and couldn't be contrived. They each said "we could never reveal that - we could never expose ourselves to the situation of the Israelis thinking and knowing that we were involved in active resistance against them." I pointed out that in fact they were charged with bombing the Israeli embassy, and therefore what conceivably could they imagine that the Israelis would think could be worse.

Each of them clearly had a huge mental block along the lines of "they know we didn't do it - they must know we didn't do it, and therefore at the end of all this we could never think, and they could never believe that - that we have been involved in that bombing" - even if they were convicted. Their central thinking was that those who know - governments, intelligence agencies, security services - know they didn't do it. That in fact maybe the case.

The jury had an extraordinarily difficult task in this case, and one makes no bones about it. These two have left a litter of their private thoughts, political beliefs and their experimentation. Courageously both gave compelling evidence in the witness box. But for a jury to have to begin from scratch to have to have explained to them the history of Palestine, the history of Israeli occupation, the history of Palestinian resistance, the difficulties with the Palestinian community of ever achieving effective resistance - to have all that explained before you even get to the facts of the case is a major educational process.

It used to be in this country that we had a right to jury challenge. Amongst the many casualties of the last government was the right to challenge jurors in an attempt - a wholly proper and legitimate attempt - to achieve a jury that was capable of understanding what we were saying.

You all know that you know almost on sight - certainly on instinct, if you can talk to someone. You don't even need to ask them questions or to engage in conversation. You could often tell across the room, - I could relate to that person - I could explain things to that person - that person would be resistant to me and to what I am saying and the way I am saying it. But now in this country the first 12 people who sit down to judge a case are the people who do it. There is no 'Voire dire'; there is no right to question attitudes, opinions, prejudices. That's all gone. Unless a juror is disqualified by vocational obligation, work, or a direct and explicit potential bias such as being an Israeli, or having been in the immediate vicinity of the explosion - what you have are the first 12 people who sit down.

Here as well as all the complexity of the unknown, to begin from scratch what most of us in England have no knowledge of - shamefully little understanding of the history of Palestine. To begin that task when you know the juror could be disinterested, ill equipped, not sufficiently imaginative, even not sufficiently intelligent. The juror could be a person who carries unrevealed prejudices, and unrevealed resistance to having an open mind.

All of that we don't know, but what we do know in this case, and what was truly terrifying, is that a journalist during the case - who had a view - who no doubt had prejudices, and who had a clear interest in the conviction of these defendants and clear opposition to the views they were expressing. This journalist directly spoke in full view of the clerk, and had sufficient confidence to engage in conversation with at least one of the jury. That gives one extreme pause for thought in any event about the outcome of this trial. It happened. The judge refused to disqualify that juror who had been in contact with the journalist, and no exploration took place during the trial of that journalist's contempt of court, which is a criminal offence. Neither do we know, nor have we ever been told that any further enquiry as a response took place at the end of the trial. If one had no other cause for concern about this case, that would be one.

It would be extremely difficult to even try to go into evidence that convicted them. In defence, they explained the background of the two of them. They explained every item and every exhibit. They were able to deal with all of it, but to achieve acquittal they had to make the jury understand that their experiments in small explosive devices were for the purpose of self defence, for potential use should anyone care to follow up on their ideas in the occupied territory. What it had no use for was any criminal activity, any explosion, any endangering of life, any damaging of property in this country.

One watches juries in cases when one sees how they go back and forth in what they seem to respond to. In this case, the jury was engaged when Jawad for instance was describing with the extraordinary help of a huge model aeroplane which was brought into court, how in his wild fantasies he was somehow ferrying explosives on model aeroplanes or decoy or surveillance equipment into the occupied territory. If one could put it in context, what Samar and Jawad described were ideas, experiments, imaginings of amateurs; of idealistic young people who felt themselves burdened by the particular educational talents that they had, and feelings of responsibility for people of whom they felt a total part, who were under occupation.

If one analyses the bombing of an embassy - that sort of activity - it is not the first time that an Israeli embassy or target has been bombed. But who carries these things out in England, or in Argentina or anywhere else? Who is it? Who does it, and on whose behalf? Primarily informed intelligent observers would say that somewhere at the back of all this would usually be a government. Which government remains a question.

There are substantial resources here - this was an operation of extraordinary audacity and amazing expertise. In its own terms it was of course a clear and total success. Those who perpetrated it achieved what they intended to do and left. What it bore no relation to was the small, extraordinarily remote experiments of these two defendants.

If you looked in Samar's notebooks you'd see jottings about bees because somewhere she had read that in Vietnam opposition to American soldiers could be achieved by having bees.... on honey-covered cut-outs of American soldiers. She had jottings about bees, she had jottings about what you could make from household ingredients. She was applying her education, but she was applying it in a way that, with great respect for her could never probably have achieved fruition in the daylight or in reality. Everyone who has an idea of where they should be putting their education feels responsibility; everyone here should understand that.

Many years ago when I thought to do law, I lived in another country, and read that Enoch Powell had made a speech here about rivers of blood, about the threats he perceived about incoming immigrant communities. That changed my view about where I should do law. I felt responsible, and a sense of guilt that if I did it, then I should do it in my own country. Thus, I understand totally that Samar with a qualification in chemical engineering, and Jawad with a qualification in electronic engineering would feel that if they applied their minds they could somehow adapt their knowledge and their experience and expertise to Palestinian resistance.

Now they may have been wildly wrong, and they may have been stupid, and they may have brought in to all this disaster that has befallen them many other people who find it hard to forgive them. I was extremely aware when I was defending them, that intelligent close friends and families find it hard to forgive them for coming so close to a line they should never have ventured near.

There is a great deal of anger in the Palestinian community generally, that they have exposed themselves and others by stupidity, and I don't know the perception now of the Palestinian community towards them.. But I would say that where people are wrongly convicted they can, they can, and do on occasion serve the whole of the sentence imposed upon them.

But if someone is wrongly convicted there is the potential, there is always the potential of further evidence coming to light and being discovered. A complete sea change could then take place in the perception of what happened and what the activities of these two really involved.

Somewhere, someone, and more than one person knows exactly who carried out the Israeli bombing. Those people no doubt have a great deal to cause to remain hidden, and probably a certain ironic satisfaction which often happens if these Israeli authorities may have been wrong again if that is who the target was, and the perception is that it was somehow against Israeli interests.

But if someone somewhere knows, and if somehow there is information to be shared, then the process you have all kindly involved yourself in in coming tonight is to acquire some information, and hopefully spread that information.

So what we all hope to achieve tonight is that people will take away some summary about the case. There are journalists here that could write about the case. Someone somewhere knows enough to acquit these two, and that needn't fall on stony ground because whoever knows something - that could lead to something else. It isn't sufficient to think the appeal process with various appeal applications which is now being renewed will undo all this. It is not sufficient to think that it will. It needs some more - and that more can only come from us acquiring more than we now know. So I apologise if I've gone on too long here, but thank you very much for coming.


Questions and Answers

Question: How successful do you think you'll be in your appeal? And what time scale do you think it will take?
Answer: What happens when the court turns down an application for leave to appeal which is simply one judge looking at it on paper without anyone present is what has happened. The judge looked at Samar and Jawad's application and turned it down. That means they renew their application to a 3 - judge court where they can have representatives, but they don't have legal aid.

The grounds of the appeal as they stand at the moment relate to the potential contamination of the jury by the interference of a journalist in the court and the decision by the judge to allow the jury to know about a television programme that was being broadcast during the trial. The judge refused to stop the programme being shown. It was about a Palestinian woman who had been extradited from Norway to Germany to face a second trial for a role in highjacking an aircraft in the seventies.

Now that programme had a number of potential reasons for impacting on the jury. One was clearly that it involved an allegation about the reasons why Palestinians were involved in armed struggle, and the measures Palestinians would be prepared to take to achieve liberation from occupation. There was a constant peppering of commentary from an SAS officer who had been involved in the taking over of the highjackers. There were comments by the woman highjacker, and the importance was the sentence she received. She had served a sentence of 2 years in Somalia some years before she was extradited. This was a commentary after extradition to Germany and following her trial where she received a sentence of 12 years.

The court discussed for some time whether the jury should see this programme or not. Instead of saying to the producers, "This could be shown in a week's time after the case has ended", the judge said to the jury, "We've been arguing for 3 hours as to whether you should see this programme or not. By the way it's on Channel 4 tonight at 10.30. " It was definitely flagged up and highlighted, and the jury had effectively been told to watch the programme. If I was a juror I would have noted that a highjacker who was in close company with the person responsible for shooting someone, at the end of the day received 12 years. Therefore if I had any question in my mind as to whether people in this country should be entitled to raise a defence of "self-defence" to the possession of explosives, I might think they deserve 12 years also - without any further perception that here was coming 20 years for something completely different. But it's very easy.

It used to be the case that you could talk to jurors at the end of a case. Now it is contempt of court. But in the days when one could talk to jurors it was extremely instructive and you found a range of completely wrong points of view, including the one that people wouldn't be in the 'dock' if they hadn't done something wrong, and because they are there it is our duty to reach a conclusion for the conviction. There are a range of misconceptions because we don't have the system of interrogating potential jurors in the first place through 'voire dire', and because judges are insufficiently careful about ways in which jurors could be contaminated. You will never know what dangerous cocktails exist in the jury room.

In fact, in the US neither Jawad nor Samar would have been convicted, as they still require a unanimous verdict. This used also to be a requirement in the UK. It was changed because of a falsely cultivated notion put forward by the police that juries were capable of being "nobled", and to avoid this jury challenges should be abolished. A few people of influence made noises that this was undesirable, but before we knew it yet another of our inalienable rights had gone.

So those were two grounds of appeal: interference by a journalist, and effect on a jury by a programme.

The last ground of appeal was the way the judge who in many ways had been fair during the trial, and who would have struck the jury as not being biased against the defendants, at the end of the quite careful summing up suddenly increased the potential for conviction. He repeated and repeated again something brought out by a previous speaker. This was when Samar had said ludicrously at a police station "But this is the thing people do - actually on the night of the bombing I went home to sleep" - whereas when she collected her wits, she recollected that she had been out with a friend who was ill, and there had been verifiable receipts from a chemist to show that a prescription had been obtained.

But the judge returned to do the prosecution's work for them in the end of his summing up by saying, "lies - lies in the police station " about what she did that night. A very real ground for conviction was that note the trial ended on.

So those are the three grounds for appeal which have been defined. It doesn't mean to say that others can't be honed or perfected, but I am clear in my mind that in cases like this when courts are extremely reluctant to overturn the convictions. If there is the potential to further evidence it is our duty to attempt to find it. It has to be there. It wasn't these two who did it, so someone else has to be there to be found and that is what I am emphasising this evening.


Question: I thought you made it clear they had alibis?
Answer: This is the penurious danger of being charged with conspiracy. Conspiracy is said to be the most useful weapon in a prosecutor's arsenal, and it is, because you prove your alibi and then the prosecution says "But we weren't ever actually saying that you bombed the embassy - we are just saying that you were involved in bombing the embassy".

So whatever ground you advance on, the prosecution doesn't retreat. It moves its ground and comes at you from another direction, So unfortunately had they been charged with what another co-accused, Nadia Zekra, the lady with the alleged explosive traces on the kitchen table - who had no such thing - was charged with - i.e. the actual bombing, the goalposts could not have been so easily moved.. Nadia Zakra was totally wrongly, falsely and negligently accused of the bombing. By the time of the trial the prosecution was acutely embarrassed about this and effectively said to the jury "You can rule her out". Nevertheless the poor woman lived in the knowledge that she was facing trial for 2 years, and such accusations have a lasting effect whether or not they're acquitted.

She was charged with actually bombing the embassy, but such was the distortion with the prosecution that by the time the case had come to trial she wasn't charged with Samar and Jawad and one other person Mahmoud Abu-Wardeh. She stood alone on that charge.

The others were separately charged with conspiring to cause explosions, again not with Nadia Zakra. It was an object lesson in how a prosecution have the ability to move and move the goal posts as it developed, without even having the straighforwardness and the honesty to drop the case against someone they became clear in their minds was innocent, as indeed they had Nadia Zekra.

Question: One of the aspects of the reporting of the case made me wince whenever I saw it - i.e. Balfour House was repeatedly referred to as a Jewish community institution, and I felt that this certainly couldn't have helped people make a rational appraisal. Anyone who has worked on the Palestinian issue for some time would know that it is the headquarters of British Zionism. Anyone who heard it was a Jewish institution would get the impression that there were people ready to attack any Jew or any Jewish institution in Britain, or indeed the world.
I felt this did not make for people relating to the case in a rational way, and in some ways would be prejudicial to the defendants' case. Was there any encouragement in the court for the press to report it in that way? Do you think it did indeed have a prejudicial impact?
Answer: Ironically almost worse than being charged with what they were charged with, one of the things which most affected Samar and Jawad was the allegation that they were opposed to Jewish people. From early days in the magistrates court the prosecution talked about their "planning to bomb further Jewish targets in London, and the targets were the Jewish community in London" -exactly as you say that is an alien thought to them. But the moment it is put in that context, as well as defending everything else you are defending, you are trying to protect yourself against prejudices and hatreds and bigotry that you don't have. That was part of the prosecution.


Question: The sentencing from the judge suggests to me the prejudice which is part of the mindset making it difficult to get across the message of the Palestinian cause. This needs to filter through any campaign in this particular case, and I wonder whether any police officers, forensic experts and the like, and possibly the Irish community (who I think are far more experienced than the Arab community in being vociferous about things) might give some assistance in putting in more practical input to progress in this campaign.
Answer: I think it is inevitably or usually the case, that where wrongful convictions happen that people feel extremely lost and without ideas of what could be done. It is the case that shared experience and other campaigns can be important, but having said that, I believe what drives a campaign is the heart and the head, and the people who are most driven are the people who have the most direct experience of, or comradeship with the people who are actually accused.

Although you can derive ideas, imaginative ideas from what happens to other people, I think just from my experience, what wakes me up to understanding that something terrible is happening is knowing people as friends; talking to people's friend, and to people's families. I derive confidence from what they say because it can be a very long haul, and it takes a huge commitment. It can be exhausting and it can be draining, and I think whoever could contribute something should know that different people can contribute different things. I think it isn't necessarily the case that you can take a model to another situation and say this works, although I think sometimes you could make a model of how not to do things.

You should put in your own experience from a community that is totally experienced in suffering; that lacks experience how to project, and fight against particular suffering. It is part of the syndrome which repeats itself, isn't it, as to who has the ear of the press. Is it the Palestinians or is it the Israelis who are portrayed as victims? Who has the key to unlocking attitudes which go beyond that?