Did Israel Bomb Its Own London Embassy in 1994?

How Mossad Framed Two Innocent Palestinians to Break the London Resistance Network

It’s 30 years since a shocking but little remembered double car bombing in the middle of London. The attack targeted the Israeli embassy and Balfour House which was occupied by several groups including the Jewish Agency for Israel, the Joint Israel Appeal and the World Zionist Organisation. The bombing injured 18, and there were fears that Middle East violence had come to the streets of the nation’s capital. But was the entire incident the work of Israel’s own security services? Many think so.

The first blast occurred just after midday (12:10 pm) on July 26, 1994, at the Israeli Embassy in South Kensington when an Audi car laden with between 20 and 30 pounds of explosives blew up minutes after the driver fled from the vehicle. The driver was a middle-aged woman of a Mediterranean appearance.

Partially destroying the front of the building, between 13 and 18 people were injured during the fireball. The number differs between reports. The force of the explosion caused windows to be blown out at the nearby Kensington Palace and the event was heard up to a mile away. While staff at the embassy were said to be “dazed and confused”, fortunately, the most severe injury was a broken arm, with most suffering from bruises and the effects of smoke inhalation.

Without any time for an investigation, then Israeli ambassador Moshe Raviv immediately blamed pro-Iranian groups linked to Lebanon-based Hezbollah. Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and King Hussein of Jordan condemned the attack from Washington DC, the explosions coming a day after the two met to discuss a peace treaty between Jordan and Israel.

At 1 am the following morning, thirteen hours after the initial attack, a second bomb exploded outside the headquarters of the Jewish Philanthropic Institution for Israel at Balfour House in North London. Between four and eight people were injured by the second attack though flying glass and shrapnel. Once again, the number of wounded varies depending on the source.

A group calling itself the Palestinian Resistance Jaffa Group claimed responsibility for the two bombings in letters to two Arab newspapers, the message having been posted the same afternoon as the attack at the embassy but before the Balfour House attack. No such group had been known to exist before the bombings and has never been heard from since. A motive was “established” of an objection to the meeting between Rabin and King Hussein the previous day. In January of 1995, police arrested sixPalestinians over the attack. In December of the following year, prosecutors brought four persons to trial — Jawad Botmeh, Samar Alami, Nadia Zekra and Mahmoud Naim Abu-Wardeh. Zekra stood accused of being the woman in the car at the Israeli embassy. The allegation came after traces of explosives had allegedly been found on a table at her home.

The tabloid press reaction was atypically harsh and xenophobic, having found them guilty in the popular consciousness long before a verdict. Headlines and questions such as “had [they] used their student status in the United Kingdom as a cover” were asked by the press, others asked whether the accused had “acquired scientific expertise at British universities to make bombs”. The four accused were said to be “salon revolutionaries” and “the offspring of elite families”.

Botmeh and Alami admitted at trial to having five pounds of explosives alongside three handguns. They stated that they did not intend to use the explosives in Britain. Still, they revealed that they had been carrying out experiments with explosives and passing the information back to groups in the occupied Palestinian territories. The prosecution did not accuse them of planting the bombs themselves, instead only to being members of a cell who had conspired to carry out the plot. Both defendants were quickly able to prove that they were nowhere near the scene of either attack.

Indeed, beyond the link to explosives allegedly used in the bombing, there seems to have been little to no evidence that linked them to the attacks. In just one example of how flimsy the case was, the defence revealed early in the trial that what police contended was a map showing the Israeli embassy was, in fact, a street map of Sidon in Lebanon.

Evidence given at their trial suggests that it was perhaps silly stuff to indicate that the accused were committed terrorists and potential murderers, seemingly being idealists more than anything else. The duo was working on experiments into the possibility of using remote-controlled toy aircraft to cross the Lebanon border to carry medical supplies, explosives or cameras, perhaps what we could almost consider an early version of a modern drone. The potential for such an attack was likely minimal. It was said to be a complete failure, with the “cell” only managing the grand achievement of blowing up a tree in the Peak District in a moment strangely reminiscent of the film Four Lions.

“The planes were a hobby. People would say, ‘Could you put a camera in it? Could this be used back home?’ Had we succeeded, we might have passed the information back. Our intention wasn’t to harm anybody, here or back home.”

Jawad Botmeh

Jawad Botmeh and Samar Alami were found guilty of “conspiracy to cause explosions” at the Old Bailey, receiving a 20-year sentence. The jury acquitted Nadia Zekra and Mahmoud Naim Abu-Wardeh of all charges. Many commentators saw the 20-year sentence as Category A prisoners as unduly harsh for mere conspiracy.

Botmeh and Alami lost their subsequent appeal in 2001 with the judge sayingthat 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.

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