SAMAR
and Jawad faced a conspiracy charge which criminalised their political activities
in support of Palestinians under occupation. Their books, possessions and legitimate
political interests were, in the hands of the prosecution, used as evidence
against them and led to them being locked up for 20 years.
They were set up, entrapped by a man they had naively trusted. Who was Rida
Mughrabi? Why, despite the police's admissions that they have still not found
the actual bombers, have the authorities ignored the revelations Samar and Jawad
made at the trial concerning his involvement? On whose behalf was he acting?
Who are this unknown group, the 'Jaffa Team' of the 'Palestinian Resistance'?
The bombings obviously produced a benefit to Israeli interests but never to
Palestinian interests. So was Rida Mughrabi in fact an Israeli agent? Is that
why, miraculously, no one was killed? Or were those clearly sophisticated and
precisely planned bombings also just astonishingly inept? Why were both Samar
and Jawad, two allegedly dangerous terrorist suspects remember, allowed free
on bail throughout the trial, and, in Samar's case, for seven months beforehand?
Was that MI5 manager right about the Israeli involvement? Does that explain
all the very odd and disturbing circumstances that have led to two such idealistic
young people being put in the frame?
Here is an extract from a speech given by Samar and Jawad's solicitor, Mrs Gareth
Peirce, at a public meeting in London in June 1997:
"What happened here...was clearly that there was a chemical engineer, Samar,
and an electronics engineer, Jawad, whose paths had crossed with a person who
is almost certainly involved in the bombing of the Israeli Embassy, or was himself
indirectly involved and made use of, no doubt willingly, by other persons.
There is clear evidence of those other persons. There is clear evidence of a
team consisting of at least one person who may or may not have been a middle
aged woman, but certainly had the appearance of one. That team and that individual
was present at, party to, and responsible for the bombing of the Israeli Embassy.
We have direct immediate witness testimony to that, and we have direct immediate
testimony to the fact that another person, a man, was involved in the buying
of the cars that were used in the bombing of the embassy.
Those people have gone. They have never been traced and there is no clue to
their whereabouts. There is no clue as why they did it, on whose behalf they
did it and with whose help they did it....All that is left is two people whose
paths one of these persons had crossed and who were left unprotected, exposed,
unprotectful of themselves because they didn't know they were exposed and didn't
know their paths had crossed.
It would be extremely difficult to even try to go into the evidence that convicted
them. In defence they explained the background of the two of them. They explained
every item and every exhibit. They were able to deal with all of it, but to
achieve acquittal they had to make the jury understand that their experiments
in small explosive devices were for the purpose of self-defence, for potential
use should anyone care to follow up on their ideas in the Occupied Territory.
What it had no use for was any criminal activity, any explosion, any endangering
of life, any damaging of property in this country.
Each of them [Samar and Jawad] clearly had a huge mental block along the lines
of 'they know we didn't do it'...Their central thinking was that those who know;
governments, intelligence agencies, security services, know they didn't do it.
That in fact may be the case.
So much of the case still remains unexplained that, as the judge summed up at
the end of the trial, it was like "fitting together pieces of a large jigsaw
puzzle, quite a lot of which are missing." Now, however, the mystery is even
greater. An unacceptable amount of information is still being withheld from
Samar and Jawad in the 'public interest'. All the questions remain unanswered.
Suspicions of cover-ups have increased. Quite simply, it is essential that MI5
and the prosecution release any and all the information they have about the
bombings.
As Gareth said, "Someone, somewhere knows sufficient to acquit these two. It
isn't sufficient to think the appeal process will undo all this. It needs more
and more can only come from us acquiring more than we now know."
Please lend your support to the campaign to secure Freedom and Justice for
Samar and Jawad.
