Bomb Kills Leader of Arab Group in Santa Ana Office

The regional director of the American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee was killed Friday when a bomb blast ripped through the group’s Santa Ana office. Seven other people in and around the building suffered minor injuries.

Authorities said Alex M. Odeh, 41, suffered the full force of the explosion, which was rigged to go off when he opened the door to his office on the second floor of a three-story stucco building at 1905 E. 17th St.

The FBI said no one took immediate responsibility for the bombing.

Odeh, a Palestinian-born naturalized U.S. citizen, was killed within hours of his appearance on two television news broadcasts in which he was interviewed about the hijacking of a cruise ship in the Mediterranean by Palestinian terrorists who murdered one American passenger.

In a Thursday night interview on KABC-TV (Channel 7), Odeh defended the Palestine Liberation Organization and its chairman, Yasser Arafat, saying that they had no role in the hijacking. “I think the media mistakenly linked this incident with the PLO,” Odeh said. “. . . The media ought to give the PLO and Arafat recognition, inform the public about the PLO as a political organization and Arafat in particular as the chairman of the PLO, who is a man of peace.”

Santa Ana police said they are investigating the incident as a homicide, with assistance from the FBI, U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms and the Los Angeles Police Department’s anti-terrorist division. But FBI spokesman John Hoos said his agency will conduct an investigation “aimed at determining if a terrorist group is involved.’

Odeh was taken by paramedics to Western Medical Center in Santa Ana minutes after the 9:11 a.m. explosion, which blew out more than a dozen floor-to-ceiling windows and showered the street below with glass, concrete, tattered window drapes and other debris. A hospital spokesman said Odeh suffered severe injuries to his lower extremities and died at 11:24 a.m. after undergoing surgery.

Friday’s bombing marked the second time in two months that a regional office of the Washington-based committee had been the target of a bomb. On Aug. 16, a 12-inch pipe bomb exploded outside the committee’s offices in Boston, seriously injuring a police officer, Boston police said. No arrests have been made.

Six employees of the Teachers Insurance Co. across the hall from the committee offices in Santa Ana were treated for minor injuries at the same hospital and all were later released. Another woman who was either seated at a bus stop or walking in front of the building also was treated and later released from the hospital.

Other Offices Damaged

Other offices in the damaged building and across the street were evacuated. The Orange County Sheriff’s Department’s bomb squad entered the building three times between 10:30 a.m. and 1:20 p.m., when the building was declared safe.

In addition to his appearance on KABC-TV, Odeh appeared as a pro-Arab spokesman on a Cable News Network broadcast that was taped Thursday afternoon and aired that evening.

Hoos said the FBI has no evidence linking Odeh’s remarks to the bombing. He said it will take some time before investigators are able to piece together when the bomb was placed in the office.

But Angela Odeh, the victim’s sister, said she became concerned about her brother after seeing him on the news program. “I called him to tell him that I was worried because he was on Channel 7 news,” she recalled. “He said, ‘Why are you worried?’ ”

Linked to Hijacking?

James Abourezk, national chairman of the Arab committee based in Washington, said he believes that the bombing could be linked to the hijacking of the Italian cruise ship.

Abourezk, a former U.S. senator from South Dakota, who is of Lebanese descent, said: “I’m just sitting watching the news on this ship hijacking over there. There is this sense of kind of lynch mob, from President Reagan on down, it’s cowboy time, on the part of the President, on the part of the media, on the part of the Congress. . . .

“We’re all hostages of this kind of violence in the Middle East--Arab-American, Jewish-American. If American policy doesn’t change in the Middle East, it’s going to continue to be tough on us all,” he said.

‘Cowboy’ Mood

In that atmosphere, there seems to be a mood that “to go ahead and to kill some Arabs, it’s OK.” People who are “mentally unbalanced, simple minded,” take their cues from the “cowboy” mood set by Reagan, Abourezk said.

Leaders of Southern California’s Jewish community condemned the bombing.

Rabbi Bernard King, chairman of the Jewish Federation’s community relations committee, said: “We are shocked and horrified to learn of the terrorist attack on the offices of the American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee in Santa Ana. We unequivocally abhor such violent acts no matter where they occur or who the perpetrators may be.”

‘Outrageous Act’

“We expect and implore local authorities to apprehend and prosecute those responsible for this outrageous act,” King said.

Hinda Beral, director of the American Jewish Committee of Orange County, said: “We deplore the continuation of violence, this time committed against Arab-Americans in our own county. All ethnic, religious and racial groups should unite and oppose such violence. We pledge the efforts of the American Jewish Committee in that direction and send our condolences to the family of Alex Odeh.”

Steve Edelman, Orange County regional director of the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, condemned what he called the “insanity which uses bombs and bullets as a means for solving problems.”

Irv Rubin, head of the militant Jewish Defense League, had a less sympathetic response. He called the American-Arab Committee “anti-Israel.” “I’m certainly not going to lose any sleep over it,” Rubin said of the bombing.

‘Continual Threats’

Committee head Abourezk said there was no warning of a bombing in the Santa Ana case. But, “Our office out there (in Santa Ana) has received continual threats, harassing calls, calls at home (to Odeh) in which they say they’re going to kill you. . . . We’ve had more threats in L.A. office (Santa Ana) than anywhere else except in New York.”

Abourezk said that all threats had been reported to the FBI but the FBI had been “stonewalling us” and had failed to investigate. “We’re going to repeat our request to the FBI to investigate this,” he said. “We keep getting stonewalled.”

Hoos, of the FBI in Los Angeles, declined to comment. But an FBI spokesman in Washington said the agency receives “thousands of reports of threats every year. You have to look at each of them individually, but you also have to take them with a grain of salt.” Most often, he said, the reports of threats are turned over to local authorities.

Thought It Was Heater

One of those injured in the blast, Bonnie Bingham, 24, a Teachers Insurance employee, said: “I was just walking back to my desk, when I heard a big explosion and saw the door fly open. We thought a heater blew up or something because there was so much smoke.”

Bingham said a man from another building helped clear the hallway of debris while she and the other occupants of the office walked out to the street. She and two co-workers then got into a car and drove themselves to the hospital, where they were treated and released.

She said she did not know Odeh well and saw him in the office “only now and then,” and did not even know what the committee was. “I didn’t know what it was--Arabians or something. I knew they were against discrimination,” she said.

Joyce Lawrence, 42, of Santa Ana said she was sitting at her desk when she “heard a loud noise, looked up, and saw the ceiling falling. There was a lot of smoke.”

Runs to the Window

Linda Bullard, 34, of Irvine, who was attending a class in court reporting across the street from the building where the blast occurred, said, “I heard the explosion and I ran to the window and there was just glass strewn across the street. I saw this man and a woman who were either standing in front of the building or had been sitting on the bench in front of it. They were trying to get away from the area. The woman looked like she was either very shook up or injured.”

Those treated at the hospital included Bingham; Lawrence; Diane Kropps, 30, of Tustin; Earl Beeghley, 52, of Orange; Laura Sickles of Norwalk; Johannah Phillips, 45, of Huntington Beach, and Mary Molina Del Carmen, 38, of Santa Ana.

Times staff writers Hector Gutierrez, Dina Heredia, Lanie Jones, Kim Murphy, David Reyes and Robert Schwartz contributed to this story.