Did Israel Bomb Its Own London Embassy in 1994?
By: Michael East
Tags: Politics, Security Services, Palestine, British Politics, Middle East Politics

Botmeh and Alami lost their subsequent appeal in 2001 with the judge saying that there was “no reason to regard their convictions as unsafe”.

The “middle-aged woman of Mediterranean appearance” was never found and rather curiously CCTV at the Israeli embassy coincidentally wasn’t working on the day of the attack. Authorities transferred the Israeli security guard that tackled the female Audi driver to Israel before he could speak with investigators. To add to the suspicion of conspiracy, not only were essential staff missing from the embassy on the day of the attack, but the team who were present were said to have collected debris from the crater. The bomb was said to be highly sophisticated and beyond even IRA capabilities, the “police never [finding] a speck” of the explosive.

Both Botmeh and Alami were UK educated science students and have maintained their innocence to this day, having had appeals rejected by the Court of Appeal and the European Court of Human Rights. Amnesty International said in 2001 that Botmeh had been “denied [his] right to a fair trial”. Both were said to be “shaken” by the failure of their 2001 appeal, having maintained they were victims of a miscarriage of justice and appealed on the grounds that the Crown didn’t disclose vital evidence at trial, plus new evidence that had come to light since 1996.

“Myself and Samar had an unfair trial that was followed, after a long wait, by an unfair appeal. This was a political trial from day one, and we are totally innocent. The real perpetrators still remain free. We were only convenient scapegoats. A huge amount of evidence is still hidden, all of which points away from us. We will carry on the struggle for our freedom and justice as part of the larger struggle for our people’s freedom. I’ve got to call my parents in the West Bank now, and I’m dreading telling them the news.” Jawad Botmeh “Today, justice has lost; injustice has won, again. The judgment further perverts justice, the judges seem to have blindness in their hearts and minds. I will never regret being part of the Palestinian people’s struggle for justice and basic rights, for life with a minimum of dignity, humanity and freedom.” Samar Alami

Those who campaigned for the duo included Tory peer Lord Gilmour, the late and great Tony Benn and future Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn.

“I supported Jawad’s case inside parliament and outside including meetings/demonstrations; Jawad’s case is, I believe, a miscarriage of justice”. Jeremy Corbyn

Corbyn signed five letters of support for the pair after the failure of their 2001 appeal, writing between 2002 and 2006 and challenging then Home Secretary David Blunkett over the case.

Jawad Botmeh and Samar Alami believed that they had been set-up as patsies for the attack by a man they knew as Reda Moghrabi, an individual who was unknown to every resistance group in the occupied territories. Insisting that the bombing was detrimental to the Palestinian cause, Botmeh and Alami were both able to describe the man in detail to a professional sketch artist in entirely separate sittings commissioned by The Independent in 1999. During their 1996 trial, the judge, Mr Justice Garland, stated that as far as Botmeh and Alami were concerned, Moghrabi “could have been a Mossad agent or a police informer.”

“Moghrabi or someone with him set us up from the beginning, either deliberately or to protect themselves from being caught.” Samar Alami

Despite agreeing that the accused didn’t carry out the bombings, police and the security services made little effort to find “Moghrabi”. They took little interest in his activities and didn’t even ask for a sketch of the suspect. This was despite his identification as the bomber by the rest of the accused.

“Given the fact that two of their [the bombers’] cronies are in jail, that’s probably taken the wind out of their sails.” Israeli Embassy statement on the lack of action over Moghrabi

Alami maintained that she had taken care of the firearms in her possession for a Palestinian friend who had feared assassination in London. It was Moghrabi who had offered her and Botmeh the explosives to use in the duo’s experiments surrounding remote-controlled aircraft attacks. She was given the explosives just days before the Israeli embassy attack.

“He had phoned me… saying he was leaving Britain and he might leave a few things for me. He said that he had been doing experiments, that he had products he no longer needed… and thought of giving them to me. I wasn’t sure how to react but somehow couldn’t say no.” Samar Alami

Alami had met “Moghrabi” in 1992 after both attended a lecture on the Middle East situation and began discussing issues surrounding the Palestinian resistance with Alami and Botmeh in 1993. The discussions progressed to bomb-making by 1994, with Moghrabi said to be knowledgable in such matters. In June of 1994, one month before the bombings, Moghrabi sought Botmeh’s assistance in buying a second-hand Audi vehicle that was used by the attackers in the bombing. Investigators found a set of fingerprints on the vehicle’s documents; they didn’t belong to Botmeh. Botmeh contends they belong to Moghrabi, having given his name as “George Davies” in this instance. A man by that same name purchased the vehicle used to attack Balfour House two days prior, and on that occasion he was alone.

Writing in The Independent in 1999, Robert Fisk constructed a biography of Moghrabi from statements made by Alami and Botmeh. How much is real and how much was “backstory” for a character that Moghrabi may have been playing is open to debate.

Born in the West Bank around 1950 to parents who had abandoned their home on the coast during the Nakba, the 1948 flight of Palestinians from what became Israel, Moghrabi grew up in Nablus or Ramallah. Arrested by the Israelis for “resistance activities” in 1978 or 1979, he moved to Jordan where he taught at the Barqaa refugee camp.

In early June 1982, Moghrabi fought Israeli invasion forces on the Lebanese coast road south of Sidon. Falling out with both Yasser Arafat’s PLO and Arafat’s opponents in Damascus, he left Lebanon via Syria and Cyprus for Britain where — through refugee status or marriage to an Englishwoman — he went into business with Gulf contacts. In the mid-Eighties, he moved to Kuwait but then fled when Iraq invaded in 1990, returning to Britain to live in Birmingham.

While mental illness and negative portrayals in the media have served to obscure the validity of his early revelations surrounding the shadowy world of the security services, former MI5 agent David Shayler alleged to Paul Foot of The Guardian in 1997 that MI5 had prior knowledge of the attacks. Shayler alleged that they could have prevented the explosions, adding that he had seen documentation that suggested Israel had been responsible for the attacks. The British government served an injunction on the claims before lifting it in November of that year.

“Mr Shayler told Mr Foot that he had seen a memorandum written by a senior MI6' line officer’ suggesting the Israelis may have done it themselves in order to prompt the British into providing increased security to Israeli and Jewish offices in Britain.” Lebanese Daily Star

Shayler wasn’t alone in his claims that MI5 had received prior knowledge of the attacks. Both Arab and Israeli diplomats and the Jewish Board of Deputies in London said that they had all given warnings to MI5 surrounding imminent attacks on Jewish targets in Britain. The security services ignored these warnings.

Nor was Shayler alone in believing that the Israelis were responsible for the attack, even amongst other former MI5 officers. Annie Machon, who left the service at the same time as Shayler with the intent of whistleblowing on crimes committed by the security services, agreed that Israeli intelligence was responsible.

Machon alleges that the senior MI5 officer assigned to the case wrote in his formal assessment of the affair that Mossad had bombed their embassy.

The reasons given for the “attack” were to push MI5 into increasing security around Israeli installations and interests around London, particularly in light of the 1992 attack on the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires. Mossad were also lookin to frame and break the Palestinian activist network in London.

Jawad Botmeh was finally released from prison in 2008 and found work as a researcher at London Metropolitan University. He lives happily in London with his wife and daughter Zeina who was born in 2009. Samar Alami was said to have suffered a breakdown through her experiences in detention. She was released in April of 2009 and deported to Lebanon and reunited with her parents, family and friends.