Experiments

AT the trial Samar and Jawad admitted to renting the locker. They, bravely, also didn't try to hide their dabbling in experiments to help Palestinians in the Occupied Territories. They had being trying to work out if basic explosive mixtures could be improvised out of ordinary household products. They wanted to find out how to make something that could be used by Palestinians in the Occupied Territories as some kind of basic self-defence against Israeli aggression there. But they had not had any success with the ingredients they had been using and they thought that what Rida Mughrabi had given them might be of some help.

Samar and Jawad had felt isolated in Britain from the Palestinian struggle in the Occupied Territories. As with most of the more than four million Palestinians dispersed throughout the countries of the diaspora, they wanted to do what they could to help. They wanted to use their educational skills to try and give some direct assistance. Hence their, albeit unsuccessful, attempts work out how to improvise home- made explosives from the kind of ingredients available in any grocery store and thus available to Palestinians within the Occupied Territories and Israeli occupied southern Lebanon. Items that would not be cut off by Israel's extensive controls and restrictions of goods into the Occupied Territories. Once they had found out how to do this, they hoped to send the information over to the Occupied Territories. As Jawad said, they were trying to "do something to help my fellow countrymen". Indeed, the rhetoric filled books and magazines found at Samar's uncle's mostly unused flat were clearly written for use by people inside the Occupied Territories, such as 'Engineering of Explosives' which was written by the then head of Arafat's Palestinian National Police. Also amongst the litter of notes and papers found there were her amateurish scribblings and note-like jottings of her tiny experiments with explosive mixtures.

They had also been looking at whether radio controlled model aircraft, a hobby of Jawad's, could be used by Palestinians to fly from a neighbouring state into the Occupied Territories carrying video cameras for surveillance, perhaps some small scale medical and chemical supplies, or to be used in a defensive capacity against Israeli troops attacking Palestinian villages. This explains the magazines about the Israeli army and electronics found in the locker. His notebook in the locker documents these experiments. Jawad brought a full sized radio controlled aircraft into court and demonstrated at length how his ideas would work. But this project never really developed either, and it remained a hobby. Inevitably, though, the prosecution, described Jawads notebook as "of no interest".

But their experiments with improvising explosive mixtures had concluded miserably in the pouring rain in the Peak District without even the reaction of a damp squib from the ingredients they were using. These included ordinary household products such as nail varnish remover, hair dye, shampoo etc. The chemical notes that were found in Samar's uncle's flat are hers and they document these experiments. They were very occasional, limited in scope, amateurish and clearly never got beyond a very embryonic stage. In fact, they had been so useless that Jawad had felt able to conduct his last attempt in a London park.

The legality of Samar and Jawads experiments was not challenged by the prosecution and was never an issue at the trial. Appendix B discusses this more fully.

The failure of their experiments meant that by 1995 they had largely abandoned their ideas - Jawad's business attempts had failed and so, as usual, he was short of money, Samar was in the middle of her MSc exams and they were both under pressure from hectic family lives. In June 1994 though, a couple of weeks before the locker was rented, Rida Mughrabi telephoned Samar, saying that he was moving out of England and was going to come by and leave off, perhaps, if he could, a number of things with her. When they met, he gave her the two boxes which contained the chemicals, the improvised TATP powder, the timer devices and the other miscellaneous items such as face masks, safety spectacles, polystyrene and a knife. Samar was particularly interested in the improvised TATP as it was actually an explosive mixture she had experimented with and failed. She was not particularly conscious of what the other items in the boxes were. When she told Jawad what had happened, they decided to store what they had in a lock-up unit for safety. The two tiny and basic 'bomblets' in the locker are examples of the experimentation they wanted to carry out with what Mughrabi left them.

Shortly after he gave her those boxes he vanished without trace. Samar admits her naivety in accepting them, but the clear suspicion must be, as she explains, "Mughrabi or someone with him set us up from the beginning, either deliberately or to protect themselves from being caught."