FOREWORD

I AM a sceptical sort of chap, especially about British justice, but when I first head about the case for Samar Alami and Jawad Botmeh, I didn't believe a word of it. I mean, just consider. Two young Palestinians, both passionately committed to their cause, had been accused of being involved in the bombing of the Israeli embassy in London and some Zionist offices. The two freely admitted dabbling in explosives and storing them in a lock-up. Even if they denied any connection with the lock-up, their fingerprints were all over it. The connection between their arrest for involvement in the bombings and their connection with explosives was, it seemed, decisive. I felt political sympathy for the two accused, and distress at the enormous sentences they faced. But for many months, as their long ordeal unwound at trial, I was not at all persuaded, let alone convinced, of their innocence.

Some months after their conviction, impressed by the obdurate determination of Samar's sister Randa and the rest of her family, and struck by the curious statement from the former MI5 agent David Shayler that British intelligence had been warned in advance about the bombing, I went on Sunday morning to see the two prisoners' solicitor, Gareth Peirce. I have known Gareth for twenty years or so and have some experience of her intense loyalty to her clients. This loyalty, however, I knew for certain, never extended to lying or cheating. "If they are innocent," I started hesitantly.

"Oh, they are innocent," she replied at once, and told the following story. At the time of the bombing, Samar was making a phone call from a public phone box. When she was first arrested, she had no idea of the fact, and could not remember where she was. When she did remember, she thought the phone box episode to be irrelevant. She did not know that calls from the phone box, most unusually, were recorded. Now think, says Gareth. The recorded phone call proves Samar was not at the Israeli embassy at the time of the bombing. If she had anything to do with the planning of the bombing, she would have made sure she could prove where she was. The fact that she could prove where she was, but didn't know she could, was surely extraordinary. For a person guilty of an atrocity to have a cast-iron alibi and not to know it was, surely, unique.

This was not, of course, conclusive -- nothing like it. But it made me think again. Any serious thinking about this case leads one to the conclusion that dabbling in some explosives does not prove involvement with a specific explosion. No one could connect the explosives used by Samar and Jawad to the explosives used at the embassy. Indeed, there was no direct evidence of any kind to link the two young people to the bombings. The more I read, the more questions I asked, the more it seemed that the involvement of these two young people with the explosives had nothing to do with the bombing of the embassy. Instead, their involvement may have been the reason why suspicion fell on them in the first place. Could it have been their commitment to the Palestinian cause and their dabbling in explosives to help Palestinians in the Occupied Territories defend themselves that had marked them out as fall guys for an outrage which had all the hallmarks of an international terrorist bombing?

Reading the judge's long summing up in this case, I was struck by the fact that the mysterious central figure in the story did not appear at the trial. The man known as "Mughrabi" who persuaded Jawad to go with him to buy the bomb car and who had handed Samar a bag of explosives had vanished into thin air. The authorities could not find him. At one stage the judge even suggested he might never have existed (this was nonsense -- there were witnesses to prove that two men, not one, bought the bomb car). The more you study this case, the more it becomes clear that Samar and Jawad were set up by a person or persons far more resourceful that they. If the bombing, like almost all embassy bombings, was carried out by agents of a foreign power, then it seemed more than likely that the two prisoners had been fingered long before the bombing as the people who would be blamed for it.

In the summer of 1998, I met David Shayler, then on the run in France. He told me he had seen a note by a senior MI5 officer which expressed the view that the Israelis had bombed their own embassy in order to win more freedom of action from British intelligence. Shayler is not a fantasist. Pretty well everything he has told British journalists has turned out to be true. I don't have to believe the Israelis were responsible for the bombing -- indeed I am still sceptical about that. But I do think that the bombing was the work of intelligence agencies far more powerful than anything Samar and Jawad could ever put together.

The case for innocence (and the set-up) of these two young prisoners is meticulously set out in Daniel Guedalla's pamphlet. The author helped prepare the prisoners' legal case, and attended most of the trial. It is almost impossible for anyone to read his work and be "sure" (as juries have to be) of the defendants' guilt. Indeed, it is hard not to conclude firmly that they are innocent.

This is not an academic exercise, a test for legalistic brains. The story is about two young people who cared passionately about the desperate fate of their people at the hands of a brutal occupying power, who tried to do something about it and in the process got caught in a web which had been set out for them. They should be released. If you read this pamphlet and are even partly convinced by it, you should do something, however small, to haul Samar Alami and Jawad Botmeh out into the light. For a start, there is a powerful campaign, which you can join at once.

Paul Foot