File:JusticeDenied.pdf

A report written in 1999 in the run up to the unsuccessful appeal by Samar and Jawad against their conspiracy convictions. Includes a preface by Paul Foot.

 report  by Daniel Guedalla dated 1999

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Subjects: Jawad Botmeh, Samar Alami, 1994 London Israeli Embassy attack
Source: Freedom and Justice for Samar and Jawad (Link)

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From the Preface by Paul Foot

The more you study this case, the more it becomes clear that Samar and Jawad were set up by a person or persons far more resourceful that they. If the bombing, like almost all embassy bombings, was carried out by agents of a foreign power, then it seemed more than likely that the two prisoners had been fingered long before the bombing as the people who would be blamed for it.

In the summer of 1998, I met David Shayler, then on the run in France. He told me he had seen a note by a senior MI5 officer which expressed the view that the Israelis had bombed their own embassy in order to win more freedom of action from British intelligence. Shayler is not a fantasist. Pretty well everything he has told British journalists has turned out to be true. I don’t have to believe the Israelis were responsible for the bombing — indeed I am still sceptical about that. But I do think that the bombing was the work of intelligence agencies far more powerful than anything Samar and Jawad could ever put together.

The case for innocence (and the set-up) of these two young prisoners is meticulously set out in Daniel Guedalla’s pamphlet. The author helped prepare the prisoners’ legal case, and attended most of the trial. It is almost impossible for anyone to read his work and be “sure” (as juries have to be) of the defendants’ guilt. Indeed, it is hard not to conclude firmly that they are innocent.

This is not an academic exercise, a test for legalistic brains. The story is about two young people who cared passionately about the desperate fate of their people at the hands of a brutal occupying power, who tried to do something about it and in the process got caught in a web which had been set out for them.