THE TRIAL

THE TRIAL started at the Old Bailey in London in October 1996. It lasted for ten weeks and was conducted throughout under conditions of intense international publicity. Samar Alami, Jawad Botmeh and Mahmoud Abu- Wardeh were charged with conspiring to cause explosions in the UK between January 1993 and May 1995, with intent to endanger life and/or damage property. No specific mention was made of the bombings at the Israeli Embassy and Balfour House. Nadia Zekra was not alleged to have been involved in the conspiracy, but she was supposed to have been the woman who left the Audi car bomb outside the Israeli Embassy and was thus the only defendant charged with actually causing an explosion.

The case against Nadia was dismissed by the judge before her defence had even started. He described the evidence against her as "dangerously flawed" and said "It would be dangerous in the extreme to allow this case to go before a jury. I have no hesitation in discharging this case." He had already dismissed evidence of alleged tiny traces of explosives found in her kitchen and in her car because the samples taken were wholly unreliable having been heavily exposed by the authorities to potential contamination. The judge dismissed the sole alleged identification of her, by PC Duncan, because it was "suspect with serious inconsistencies." Four other officials present at the scene had failed to pick her out.

Before the trial, Nadia had spend five months on remand at Holloway prison. But considering the weakness of the evidence against her it is shocking and bizarre that she was ever even charged. To this day she remains completely wrecked by the ordeal she was put through. There was no real case against Mahmoud and he was acquitted by the jury at the end of the trial having spent two years on remand in Belmarsh. Fortunately, he has had some success in putting his life back together and has since married.

The case against Samar and Jawad

SAMAR and Jawad were alleged to have been a party to the conspiracy behind the explosions at the Israeli Embassy and Balfour House. As the case developed it emerged that Jawad was alleged to have been involved in buying the cars, and the chemicals used to make the bombs. Samar was allegedly involved in making the explosives.

It was assumed by the prosecuting authorities (except for that senior MI5 manager it seems) that the bombings were carried out by Palestinians who were anti-British, anti-Zionist, anti- Israeli, anti-Arafat and violently opposed to the 'peace process'. This was the police and the prosecution's identified motive for the attacks. Having traced Jawad through his ownership of the BMW seen at the Milton Keynes car auction, they claimed, with startling disregard for the truth and the complexities of the Palestine-Israel struggle, that this 'profile' fitted him and the other defendants, his friends.

Both Samar and Jawad had alibis for the day of the bombings, separate alibis both of which it turns out can be proved and have been confirmed by witnesses and documentary evidence. Samar was in the library at Imperial College at the time of the embassy bombing, telephone records confirm that, and Jawad had taken his younger brother down to Sussex to look at an English language school, cell area records of a mobile phone call he made prove that. But when they were questioned in 1995 neither of them could remember what they had been doing on that day six months before. Hardly the behaviour of guilty people. "You can't be involved and not know what you did on the day of the bombing" said their solicitor, Gareth Peirce.

They were only arrested because Jawad had gone to the car auction with Rida Mughrabi, a recent and occasional social acquaintance who it is now clear was involved in the bombings. The rest of the evidence against them was all circumstantial and was almost entirely related to their political activities. Most importantly, the conspiracy charge they faced was vague, so vague and catch-all that it actually allowed their political activities, books, magazines, viewpoints and social relations to become criminalised and used as prosecution evidence. Mrs Peirce explains the difficulty of dealing with such a charge,

Conspiracy is said to be 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...It was an object lesson in how a prosecution can have the ability to move and move the goalposts as the case developed....