SAMAR
had met Rida Mughrabi socially in the spring of 1992 when they both attended
a lecture in London on the Middle East. He also attended various political discussions
and poetry readings at meetings of the Arab Club in London. Apparently he was
from the West Bank, had been detained by the Israelis in the late 1970s, had
taught at a refugee camp in Jordan and had been involved in fighting Israeli
forces in occupied southern Lebanon during the 1982 war. Samar, and then Jawad,
latched onto him because of his background knowledge and involvement in the
resistance, and what appeared to be relevant experience that might help with
their failed experiments. In 1993 Mughrabi began discussing methods of resistance
open to Palestinians inside the Occupied Territories. By March 1994 they were
also talking about the techniques of making improvised explosives. They never
openly discussed their ideas with Mughrabi, their experiments were secret, but
as they weren't getting anywhere with their experiments, it was interesting
for them to come across someone who appeared to have actual hands on experience.
Rida Mughrabi certainly knew a lot about electric and electronic aspects of
military surveillance. He spoke interestingly and authoritatively about events
that had happened and seemed to have direct experience in the field in Lebanon
and during the Israeli invasion and occupation of Lebanon. Indeed, Mughrabi
told Samar that he had been doing some experimenting of his own and what he
was giving her was the product. She thought that he had actually been performing
his experiments for the same reasons as she and Jawad had e.g. directed at what
could be done on inside the Occupied Territories.
From what they can piece together from the bits he told them, Mughrabi left
Lebanon in the early 1980s after falling out with the PLO and with Arafat's
opponents, and then came to Britain via Cyprus. He stayed in Britain, either
as a refugee or through marriage to an Englishwoman, and went into business
with Gulf contacts. In the mid-1980s he moved to Saudi Arabia, then Kuwait,
but when Iraq invaded he returned to Britain and went to live in Birmingham.
He gave Samar the boxes in the centre of London in the middle of the afternoon,
one day at the end of June 1994. He said that he no longer needed the products
of his experiments because he was leaving England. Samar felt uncomfortable,
was not sure how to react, but did not feel she could say no and so she accepted
them. "I guess I was a bit naive." she said at the trial, "I never felt threatened
by Rida Mughrabi. I didn't take nearly enough precautions."
Samar and Jawad used a little of the TATP Mughrabi gave them to make up two
little 'bomblets' on 15 July. But Samar was about to join her parents in France
on holiday two days later and she and Jawad did not have time to try them out
before she went, so she rented the locker on 16 July to store them safely. The
amateurishness of their enterprise is underlined by the fact that when the bomblets
were discovered by the police they were not in any state to have ever gone off
and the two metal rods stuck into the TATP had corroded and were useless.
It should be noted that Samar returned to Britain after that holiday in France,
just as she also returned from her trip to Lebanon later in the year to carry
out some research for her MSc thesis. Clearly then, she made no attempts to
escape from Britain, despite having every opportunity to do so -- hardly the
actions of a guilty person.
Just over a month
after Mughrabi gave Samar and Jawad those boxes, the bombings at the Israeli
Embassy and Balfour House took place. Samar and Jawad then took no further action
in relation to the locker other than for Jawad to hide randomly in it more books
and magazines, and the aerial, that they thought they should clear out of their
homes in case they were raided by the police. Thereafter, everything in the
locker unit stayed put. Although neither considered that they were involved
in any way with the bombings, they both believed that there might be a repeat
of what happened during the Gulf War when dozens of Palestinians and Arabs were
rounded up and detained without charge.
Indeed, even at the trial,
and facing serious allegations of involvement in the bombing of the Israeli
Embassy, they were still unsure as to whether they should reveal in their defence
what it was they had been doing. ÒPerhaps the most important thing was the intense
personal debate each of the two had to decide to give evidence to the juryÓ
remembers Gareth Peirce:
That decision involved
what to them was a total exposure of what they thought hitherto were private
and secret, and deeply, deeply damaging thoughts. TheyÕve each come from different
directions and have talked about experimenting with defensive measures in resistance
to Israeli occupation. They each said that we could never reveal that, we could
never expose ourselves to the situation of the Israelis knowing that we were
involved in active resistance against them.
Samar and Jawad had a very real sense of fear that their lives would be in danger
if they revealed these activities. Each was served at an early stage in the
case with a Notice of Intention to Apply for Deportation. They both expressed
fears that they would be punished, killed by the Israelis, if they gave these
explanations in court in order to defend themselves against a charge of which
they were sure the Israelis knew they were innocent.
But once they had named Rida Mughrabi and explained his, now obvious, involvement
in the bombings, the authorities took no interest. Samar and Jawad were not
even asked by the police to provide a detailed description so that a portrait
could be compiled. Indeed, it was up to their solicitor to arrange for that
to be done. When it was, after they had each been in separate prisons for over
a year since the trial, the two faces the sketch artist drew from each of their
quite separate descriptions were so similar that were obviously of the same
man, a man who was clearly involved in the bombing of the Israeli Embassy.
The police admit that the case is not 'solved', that the actual bombers have
not been caught. So it is odd, to say the least, that they have so little interest
in Rida Mughrabi.
