WHILE
Samar was under arrest and her shared family home was searched, the police found
a sketch map of Sidon, a Lebanese coastal town. Her sister had drawn it in 1992
when she was going to visit friends who lived there, it contained only her fingerprints
and it was in her notebook. The Alami family told the police all of this at
the time when Samar was detained. But right up to the trial the police and the
prosecution insisted on claiming that it was actually a map of the Balfour House
area in Finchley, north London.
No proper research
was done by the prosecution into the geography of the map or the translation
of the names written on it. No further questions were asked of her sister. Indeed,
until they were forced to concede that it was nothing of the sort, the prosecution
even described the map as one of their most significant finds. As the judge
explained, The sketch in [Samar's sister's] notebook which was not, after all,
Tally Ho corner and which was abandoned by the Crown after our video tour of
Sidon.
This was the only piece of evidence that was supposed to link any of the defendants
with the planning of the Balfour House bombing, but it was abandoned before
the trial was even half- way through. As with so much else in this case, a less
determinedly blinkered approach by the prosecution would have enabled the truth
to come out sooner. Unfortunately, this was how they approached the case from
the very beginning. It was hardly an investigation, more a classic example of
a group of people being arrested, and then the police and the prosecution attempting
to mould those scraps of evidence they could find in order to prove them guilty.
This certainty, this blinkered approach and absolute refusal to accept anything
which went contrary to their initial view, is what resulted in this miscarriage
of justice, as with so many others in recent memory.
ALSO
in the Nationwide locker unit were two guns, wrapped in cloth inside a cash
box with some ammunition. Police tests and Interpol checks showed that neither
gun had ever been used or connected with any criminal activity anywhere. Indeed,
they were in pieces and were in not in any state to be used at all. There was
another gun stashed in a hatch in a cupboard in the hallway of Samar's uncle's
mostly unused flat. This gun had never been used either.
Jawad knew nothing about these guns. Samar had been given them for safekeeping
a few years beforehand by a Palestinian friend who feared assassination when
he was in London. He had them for the protection of himself and his companions.
The court heard evidence of the many assassinations by Israeli squads in London
in recent years and that on occasion the British government had actually expelled
Mossad agents from London. Because of this background, some Palestinians felt
that they needed weapons for protection and self-defence. But Samar herself
was not in danger, she doesn't like guns or use them, and that is why she kept
them hidden away. No guns were seen, used or connected in any way with either
of the bombings so their relevance is not clear.
To give all of this some context, a close friend of Samar's family, the famous
Palestinian cartoonist Naji El-Ali, was assassinated in London by Mossad in
1987. Indeed, it was his son and widow that Samar's sister had gone to visit
on her trip to Sidon, the map of their house being the map the prosecution claimed
was of Finchley.
