The indictment of four members of a radical Palestinian group who allegedly plotted to kill Jews and blow up the Israeli Embassy here may signal a new determination on the part of the U.S. government to crack down on terrorists operating on American soil.
The move, announced by the Justice Department on Thursday, came just over a month after the bombing of the World Trade Center in New York shocked Americans into recognizing the dangers of domestic terrorism.
The four men, all members of the Abu Nidal terrorist group, were indicted Wednesday in U.S. District Court in St. Louis, where three of the defendants live.
The men charged were identified as Zein Isa, Saif Nijmeh and Luie Nijmeh of St. Louis, and Tawfiq Musa of Milwaukee. Isa was already serving a jail sentence, and the other three men were arrested by FBI agents Thursday.
Charges against the defendants, for activities dating as far back as 1986, include the 1989 murder of Palestina Isa, the teen-age daughter of Zein Isa; smuggling money to other members of the Abu Nidal group; targeting Jews for murder; and obtaining weapons illegally.
Luie Nijmeh discussed the idea of blowing up the Israeli Embassy with a co-conspirator, the Justice Department charged.
The embassy had little to say about the case Thursday afternoon. Israeli officials said they were “looking into the matter and were in contact with American authorities.”
The arrests and indictments are an indication of the U.S. government’s heightened concern about terrorism since the World Trade Center bombing in late February, according to Steven Emerson, a writer and terrorism expert.
But he said the timing of the indictments, so soon after the New York bombing, may be “more of a coincidence” than a deliberate decision to demonstrate U.S. activism against terrorism at the present time.
WARNINGS ‘FELL ON DEAF EARS’
The defendants were charged under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations statute, which is generally used to charge members of organized crime syndicates.
This represents the first use of the RICO statute to prosecute terrorists and shows an aggressive new strategy” against terrorists by the U.S. government, Emerson said.
He said that information relating to this case, which has been under investigation for several years, shows that the Abu Nidal movement has an extensive infrastructure in Latin America and Europe.
Emerson said the defendants had conducted surveillance at the Israeli Embassy in Washington and had been maintaining a list of possible Jewish targets since 1986.
In addition, Emerson said that defendant Isa allegedly was instructed to kill his daughter by overseas representatives of the Abu Nidal organization because the girl was becoming too Westernized and represented a security problem.
The Abu Nidal group is infamous for a long string of bloody showcase attacks, including the simultaneous assaults at the Rome and Vienna airports in December 1985 and the 1986 massacre at the Neve Shalom synagogue in Istanbul.
In recent months, Israel has been warning that members of Palestinian terrorist groups, including the Islamic fundamentalist Hamas movement, have been establishing bases in the United States.
“The Israeli warnings fell on deaf ears,” Emerson said.
He feels that the terrorist groups are “fusing” the United States and Israel in their minds and that it is now easier for them to plant bombs in the United States because of the relative lack of difficulty entering this country.
Legislation was introduced in Congress recently that would bar members of Hamas from entering the United States.
Advocates of greater terrorism awareness say that the combination of the trade center bombing and this new indictment could make Americans more conscious of a domestic terrorism problem.
“These incidents show that the terrorism problem is not one of terrorists dispatched from overseas, but one of people living among us,” Emerson said.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
