THE
LOGIC, then, is that the chemicals given to Samar and Jawad by Rida Mughrabi
have no connection with the bombs that exploded at the Israeli Embassy and Balfour
House. Those chemicals were traced to have been part of a much larger, over
half tonne order collected from Hays Chemicals in Birmingham in June 1994. They
were collected by someone giving virtually the same name, 'G Davis', as that
given by Mughrabi to buy the Audi bomb car and by whoever it was that bought
the Triumph. The prosecution said that a transit van would just about have been
able to hold all the drums and containers bought from Hays. There is no evidence
that they were ordered or collected by Samar or Jawad, indeed the handwriting
and fingerprints on the purchase documents do not match any of the defendants
and remain unidentified.
Furthermore, that amount of chemicals, well over 1200 lbs. in the full order,
obviously could not have fitted into the tiny locker that Samar and Jawad rented.
Any explosive mixture made with all those chemicals would have amounted to hundreds
of kilos. Yet in the locker were only the two tiny bomblets and about 25lbs
of off-the-shelf weedkiller. The bomblets weighed only half a kilo each and
so, including the small amount of powder left over, there was only 2.5 kg of
TATP in that locker. So, where were the rest of the Hays chemicals stored? No
one knows. If it the Hays Chemicals that were prepared and made into the two
powerful boobytrapped car bombs -- where was it all done? No one knows.
What is known is that none of the defendants or other people questioned could
be connected to any large storage facilities. Samar and Jawad were under police
surveillance for several months but still nothing was found. As the judge summed
up, "We do not know, and this is another missing piece [of evidence in the case],
where the half tonne load went. There must have been a safe house, perhaps a
lock-up garage or small warehouse. There was far too much to have gone into
the Nationwide lock-up which is quite small, and, of course, the defence asks
why hire the lock-up if they had got a safe house somewhere else. If the acetone
and hydrogen peroxide [some of the Hays Chemicals order] were made up into TATP
where was it done? There was no trace of it at any of the relevant addresses."
Neither was there any trace of the massive set-up, or 'bomb factory', that would
have been needed: a factory with good ventilation, running water to prevent
overheating, large mixing and contact vats, drainage for the remaining liquid
and space for drying in addition to storage facilities for the chemicals and
TATP upon production. Between 2-4 weeks processing time, minimum, would be needed,
it would require at least three or four people and would all have to be conducted
under safe, well-controlled and discreet conditions.
It was accepted by the judge that Samar and Jawad have no links with any terrorist
organisation, and it is perfectly obvious from their amateurish experiments
that they do not have anything like the required level of expertise to mount
this kind of operation. This and their failure even to keep up the rental on
the locker thus causing it to be discovered, should be contrasted with the professional
precision and astonishing audacity with which the Israeli Embassy and Balfour
House explosions were carried out in the middle of London without leaving any
traces whatsoever. "What it [the bombings] bore no relation to was the small,
extraordinarily remote from reality experiments of these two defendants", said
Gareth Peirce. Indeed, as the judge described the two tiny devices in the locker,
"any competent DIY electrician who knew his positive from his negative would
probably have been able to assemble what are actually fairly basic devices."
Obviously, if they were involved in any way with the organisation behind the
bombings then that organisation would surely have protected themselves, if not
Samar and Jawad, by ensuring that this 'evidence' did not remain in the locker
unit. Or at least they would have made sure that the rental on the locker did
not run out causing it all to be discovered by the police.
The picture that emerges, from the pieces of information that were not covered
up in the 'public interest', is one in which the Nationwide Storage locker unit,
the prosecution's key piece of evidence, the "final breakthrough" in the case,
contained no evidence of any involvement in the bombings at the Israeli Embassy
and Balfour House. But the nature of the charge meant that no such connection
between the locker and specific bombings had to be proved. The prosecution could
just claim that, when combined with all the circumstantial and innuendo evidence
relating to their political activities, the locker showed that they were involved
in planning terrorist explosions in the United Kingdom. According to the prosecution,
Samar and Jawad's possession of those materials implied involvement in the conspiracy.
In these circumstances, there was no way out for Samar and Jawad.
