newsletter

Time for Action
Book launch
The campaign will be holding a public meeting to launch its book - 'Justice Denied - unanswered questions in the case of the Israeli Embassy and Balfour House Bombings' and to rally support for the appeal. This will take place on Tuesday 23rd February at the House of Commons at 6pm.

Two Pickets
The Appeal and PII Hearings
The application for the leave to appeal date has now been set for 29th March 1999. Unfortunately, the Crown Prosecution Service has also decided to hold a Public Interest Immunity (PII) hearing on 15th March, confirming their intention to bury this information that is not in the public domain. PII hearings are inherently unfair as they are held in secret. The defence has no way of knowing what is being said and no legal remedy to ensure independent access to the material before the court and therefore to prepare a full and substantive appeal. There can be no greater interference in the legal process than that of depriving the appellants from the new evidence needed to quash their conviction. This further injustice must be opposed.

The campaign will hold a picket for both hearings. Please put the dates of Monday 15th and Monday 29th March in your diary and come to both events at the Court of Appeal. It is crucial that we have a visible attendance at the court. And don't forget to let us know you are coming.

Other Action
Meanwhile, the campaign will continue to work with MPs and will press for Parliamentary questions. Since our last newsletter, the campaign has again raised the issue on many levels. In October, we wrote to all 650 Members of Parliament protesting this injustice and asking for disclosure. Thanks to individual letters, including those from Samar and Jawad, at least 30 MPs and 2 MEPs raised the matter by writing to the Home Secretary, the Director of Public Prosecutions, and the Attorney-General. The authorities CAN do something by disclosing all necessary information.

However, this is well below the full potential of the campaign. We urge you to do something TODAY. Write to/fax/phone your MP, MEP, the CPS, the Home Secretary, the Attorney-General, and/or anyone else in government you know! If you have written already, write again. This is our last chance to make an impression before the appeal.

The conspiracy of silence continues
It is now 14 months since former MI5 agent, David Shayler, was allowed by the government to reveal to the media the existence of specific warnings about the bombings of July 1994. According to Shayler, this came from an impeccable source.

It has also been 6 months since Paul Foot revealed in Private Eye that 'Soon after the bombing a senior MI5 manager wrote a note expressing his view that the Israelis had carried out the bombing on their own to embarrass the British government into providing more security for Israeli buildings and personnel. The note was written in September or October 1994, two or three months after the bombing.' The prosecution continues to refuse the defence access to this information, and Samar and Jawad continue to pay for this conspiracy of silence with their lives.

The importance of this information cannot be overemphasised. It is also probably only the tip of the iceberg, particularly since most of the major questions about the bombings remain unanswered. Hardly anything is known about Israeli activities around the investigation and the trial. The above mentioned intelligence assessments must point to the kind of professional, well-trained, government or intelligence supported teams that have carried out the two bombings of July 1994. The fact that this information points to such directions undermines the very premise on which Samar and Jawad (and indeed the others) were prosecuted and convicted, namely the premise that the bombings were carried out by a few disgruntled, inept, London-based 'English-Palestinians'. Of course, there are other major flaws in this premise, including the fact that the bombers themselves were never identified or caught, and that 2 out of 4 defendants were acquitted. Beyond that, the suppression of the above information must have been necessary for the prosecution to mislead the jury into believing the London-based group scenario.

If the failure of the prosecution to give the jury full information about the bombings and their investigation raises more doubts about the fairness of the trial and the safety of the convictions, the present situation. It is rather ridiculous that the defendants are being denied access to information whose existence is publicly known and officially acknowledged. It is also unfair that minister(s) who signed the original PII certificates, the trial judge and the Home Secretary know more about the bombings than the people wrongfully convicted in that connection. As new evidence is crucial for obtaining and winning an appeal against conviction, the withholding of such evidence is effectively interfering with the legal process, since it is denying the two appellants the chance of a fair appeal. This may serve some interests, but not those of justice. As Jawad said in a recent letter, "ƒ this new information which is being withheld from us is vital as it represents our last realistic chance to prove our innocence before we slide into the kind of unnecessary, inhumane time wasting that occurred with the Birmingham Six, the Guilford Four, and many other miscarriages of justice"

The case in the media
For the first time since the convictions, the case made it to the British broadsheets. Robert Fisk published two major articles on the case in The Independent on 26/11/98 and 31/11/98. The first centred around one of the two photofits of Rida Mughrabi (the purchaser of the Audi that exploded at the embassy) produced by the defendants, and detailed Mughrabi's interactions with them.

The second focused on the fact that the appeal was stalled by the authorities' continued refusal to disclose new evidence. On 1st December 1998, Paul Foot responded with another major article in The Guardian entitled "Open these bomb files", where he reiterated the information he obtained in August. He stressed that there was evidencethe existence of Rida (including his handwriting on the car purchase documents); the warning and the report written by a senior British Intelligence officer could not be explained away; and "ƒ there is a lot to suggest that these two Palestinians in jail are innocent."

These articles had tremendous response, particularly in the Arab media. In London, Al Quds and to a lesser extent Al-Hayat translated the articles. This was followed by major articles in two main Lebanese newspapers, Al-Safir and Al-Nahar, the UAE daily Al-Khaleej, Jordanian English daily The Jordan Times, and Palestinian daily Al-Hayat al-Jadidah. Further, the articles were reported in the press reviews of the BBC Arabic World Service and Al-Jazeerah TV.
THE CAMPAIGN IS TO LAUNCH AN APPEAL FOR INFORMATION ON ITS WEBSITE, INCLUDING RIDA'S PHOTOFIT.

The campaign abroad
The campaign continued to gain strength abroad in the wake of the articles. In Palestine, we were pleased to receive the sponsorship of the Palestine Independent Commission for Citizens' Rights. Both the Commission and renowned human rights organisation, Al-Haq, made representations focusing on the issue of non-disclosure. Efforts included a visit to the British Consul in Jerusalem. Jawad's family has also confirmed that dozens of individuals have written both to the Consul and the Home Secretary. Similar efforts are being mounted in Lebanon, where more campaign activities are being prepared. Lastly, the Arab Organisation for Human Rights also wrote to the Home Secretary and the Prison Service, and reviewed the case in its newsletter.

Decategorisation
Despite the fact that nearly 300 representations (280 signatures) were presented to the Category 'A' Committee, and despite the fact the prison did not object to de-categorisation in Samar's case, Samar and Jawad's applications were turned down again, mainly due to the police's insistence that they were "potentially highly dangerous"!

Actions
1. Attend the Pickets.
2. Send off a postcard to your MP requesting release of the information from MI5.
3.Raise the case at any relevant meetings you attend.
4. Sponsor the campaign, and help us to distribute the leaflet about it.
5. Make a donation to the campaign (for travel expenses for visiting, subscriptions for Samar and Jawad, printing and mailing costs, production of booklet, etc.).

In order to implement all of these plans, we urgently need your donations, suggestions and help in campaign work. To find out how you can help check our aims of the campaign page.