The Sbarro bomber’s American saga: Ahlam Tamimi escaped Israel - US failed to bring her to justice

While the United States is celebrating its 250th anniversary of independence, the parents of a teenager with American citizenship, murdered 25 years ago in an atrocity whose perpetrator, Ahlam Tamimi, was released from prison in 2011 by the Israeli government in the Schalit deal, have since then been pleading with the US authorities to follow their own laws and legal decisions to bring the murderer to justice in an American court. “Justice,” a word repeated three times in America's Declaration of Independence. The third time is regarding the Americans' “British brethren” as having been “deaf to the voice of justice...” But have the tables turned? Is it the US that has become deaf to the voice of justice demanded by Frimet and Arnold Roth, the parents of Malka Chana – Malki – a justice they have been pursuing for 15 years? Their fervent dedication and resolve have been up against powerful people in Israel, Jordan, and the US. It is a story of obfuscation and pain, with only an occasional glimmer of hope and light. With Tamimi free and living the life of a celebrity in Jordan, as we wrote in Part I, the Roths took their case to Washington.Arnold Roth: “Because Americans had been murdered at Sbarro, we hoped that a rarely invoked federal law, Section 2332a of Title 18 of the United States Code, might apply to get Tamimi back behind bars in the US.” The other American citizen murdered in Sbarro was Shoshana Yehudit Greenbaum, 31, a teacher originally from LA and living in Passaic, New Jersey. An only child, she had arrived in Israel with her husband for six weeks of graduate studies and was pregnant with their first child at the time of her death.Chana Tova Chaya Nachenberg, of Modi'in, also an American, was 31 at the time of the attack. Severely wounded, she was in a coma for almost 22 years and succumbed to her wounds on June 1, 2023. Therefore, earlier letters and articles refer to only two American citizens who were murdered in the attack.Section 2332a is a federal criminal statute titled “Use of weapons of mass destruction,” including “against a US national outside the United States.” The weapons can include “bombs, grenades, certain rockets, certain missiles, mines, similar devices... and if death results, shall be punished by death or imprisoned for any term of years or for life.”“From our research,” said Roth, “we learned that Jordan and the US entered into an extradition treaty in 1995 and that it was active; fugitives had been extradited.”In March 2012, news emerged from the Arab media that Tamimi was about to start hosting a TV show of her own. This was the trigger that got Roth to engage with the American authorities. A New York lawyer who had become a trusted adviser arranged for them (Roth and the lawyer) to travel together to Washington to meet with senior figures in the Department of Justice (DOJ) and the FBI. Roth: “We met behind closed doors. There was an emotional feel to the room. I urged them in the name of justice and decency to apply Section 2332a and get Tamimi brought to Washington for trial. I then screened a video that Frimet had recorded the night before on my cellphone. My sense was that they were touched.”The meeting ran for about 90 minutes. By the end, Roth said, he received assurances that something was going to be done. “But we're not going to be able to tell you anything,” he was told, “until we can tell you everything.”Regarding her role, Frimet Roth added, “Traveling overseas is hard for me because I am the principal carer of our youngest child, who is now 31. She lives with us at home, and her profound disabilities mean I have to do everything for her 24/7. For me, travel is not an option.” The Jordan-US treaty, provided to the Magazine in its entirety (15 pages long), states, in simple language, that both countries must extradite individuals charged with or convicted of extraditable offenses, and any offense punishable by more than one year of imprisonment in both countries is extraditable. This includes serious crimes such as terrorism, crimes against heads of state, hijacking, and narcotics trafficking. The Roths heard nothing further from the DOJ for several years. In early 2016, Roth was invited to Congress to testify before Ron DeSantis's House Oversight Committee on National Security. “What none of us in the chamber realized was that a criminal complaint had been issued against Tamimi in the District Court of the District of Columbia 15 months after our 2012 meeting with the DOJ leadership.” The fact that in 2013 the Department of Justice filed charges against Tamimi in federal court is confirmed by the DOJ Archives. But then, Arnold Roth said, “It promptly sealed them for the following four years.” Frimet confirmed, “Our request was honored, but years went by before we learned that.”March 2017: The Tamimi criminal case is revealedIn March 2017, weeks into the first Trump presidency, the US government, Roth surmised, concluded that keeping the charges secret was no longer helping its efforts to obtain Tamimi's custody. The Justice Department unsealed the charges. When making the charges public in a media presentation, acting assistant attorney-general Mary McCord described Tamimi as “an unrepentant terrorist,” and the FBI simultaneously placed her on its Most Wanted Terrorists list. How did the Roths learn about the unsealing of the charges?Arnold: “Five years had passed since I brought my challenge to the Department of Justice, and they seemed ready and willing to take it on. But nothing had happened other than Tamimi's weekly TV shows that were seen everywhere in the world. She was the embodiment of Islamist pride in jihad. “Then, in March 2017, there was a phone call from Washington. Frimet and I were asked to meet a delegation a few days later here in Jerusalem. No details, no headline, no sense of what was on the agenda.“We arrive and see the family of the other murdered American woman, people with whom we had become friends. Everyone else in the room was from Washington – a delegation made up of seven or eight prosecutors and investigators. “We were somewhere between elated and puzzled by what we heard next. Elated because they said, 'Three hours from now, there's going to be a press conference, and we're announcing that Tamimi has been charged. Sorry, we couldn't tell you, but they [the charges] were issued four years ago.' We learned she was being immediately named to the FBI Most Wanted Terrorists list.“Heading home, we began puzzling over things that were not said. For instance, they're charging her and making her an FBI Most Wanted, but no reward was mentioned. Was that normal? At home, I checked the FBI website and saw that all the Most Wanted Terrorists had serious rewards attached to their names and mugshots. Not Tamimi. “They confirmed that Jordan has an active extradition treaty with the US, and we wondered why no actual extradition to Washington had come up, and we wondered why we aren't hearing that she's being extradited to Washington tomorrow afternoon on the 4:30 p.m. flight out of Amman?”He continued, “Six days after the DOJ announcement of the Tamimi charges, we saw reports that Jordan's highest court had handed down a ruling in a hearing we had not known about – a determination that Jordan's treaty with the United States, made in 1995 between [US president Bill] Clinton and King Hussein, is invalid. That Tamimi cannot be extradited. End of case, and the decision is not appealable.“What gradually became clear but [was] unreported by any news channel,” said Roth, “was that the so-called invalidity was a Jordanian failure. Jordanian law required the treaty to be ratified by the parliament, and it wasn't. They had failed to do it.“But the defect, if that's what it was, could be cured by Jordan – only by Jordan. But Jordan didn't fix it and will not fix it, because, as we came to understand, it's not a defect; it's a fig leaf, a small and shabby one. But it's done the job for the past nine years. I'm not aware of anyone publicly calling Jordan to account for its sleight of hand.”On the official site Congress.gov, the following appears: “The United States requested Tamimi's extradition in 2017, but Jordan's Court of Cassation ruled that the extradition treaty was invalid.” In January 2018, the State Department's Rewards for Justice program announced a reward of up to $5 million for information leading to Tamimi's arrest or conviction. This also appears on Rewards for Justice, a US government site. Roth said the award was announced, “after a lot of frustrated pushing on our part.” In November 2019, the State Department said that “the United States regards the extradition treaty as valid.” More than two and a half years after Jordan said it was invalid? The wheels of justice spin slowly.I asked Arnold Roth whether Secretary of State Marco Rubio or any of his predecessors had responded to his requests to press for Jordanian compliance with the treaty.Roth: “For the next few years, no senior official from the State Department, in any administration, ever responded to us on any aspect of this.” A letter from King HusseinRoth said, “The situation gets darker. It's 2019, and in one of the very rare conversations I had with a junior desk officer in the State Department some weeks after the invalidity was announced, I learned that Jordan actually did ratify the treaty, and 'we have the documents.'“But getting a hold of that important document took months of filing applications under FOIA, the Freedom of Information Act. And when that failed, we eventually sued the government in 2020.”Among the documents delivered to the Roths' lawyers in stages, starting in early 2021, was a letter that had been signed by the late King Hussein in 1995, addressing the US government (see graphic). I asked about the other documents. Roth explained, “Scores of documents, almost all massively redacted... all dealing with aspects of the treaty process.”King Hussein's letter blew the lid off Jordan's Court of Cassation ruling invalidating the extradition treaty, a ruling that directly contradicts the clear intention of King Hussein, who had taken the treaty so seriously that he added this letter to it. Roth explained: “The letter was part of the process of each of the two countries certifying to the other that their own legal and constitutional treaty requirements had been met.”Officially translated by the US State Department, it says, “With the help of God and His guidance, we, Hussein I, having reviewed the Extradition Traety [sic], signed in Washington on March 28, 1995, between the Government of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, and the Government of the United States of America, do hereby declare our agreement to and ratification of that Traety in whole and in part. We further pledge to carry out its provisions and abide by its Articles, and we, God willing, shall not allow its violation.” Thanks to the Roths' FOIA submission and subsequent suing of the US government, this letter was made public.“The Jordanian court that had declared the treaty void and unenforceable back in 2017 said nothing about any letter like this. Didn't even hint at its existence,” Roth said. “But if we hoped revealing a formal 1995 letter from the revered King Hussein would change how Jordan's 2017 violation of the treaty looked to the media, to Congress, to the Jordanians, we were disappointed.”He said that starting just four months after Tamimi returned in 2011 to her homeland, Jordan, her TV show "began being beamed throughout the Arabic-speaking world via an Islamist satellite TV network, glorifying Islamist terrorism. It continued being produced and disseminated weekly from a studio in Jordan's capital for the next four years.“This is significant since Jordan has a notably unfree media. Nothing goes to air in Jordan unless it gets green-lighted by the Royal Hashemite Court.” Roth