Santa Ana Bombing Kills Arab Committee Director

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.

Alex M. Odeh, 41, was killed 12 hours after he appeared on a local television news broadcast during which he criticized the media for linking the Palestine Liberation Organization with the cruise ship Achille Lauro hijacking and praised PLO leader Yasser Arafat as “a man of peace.”

Authorities said Odeh suffered the full force of the blast, which was rigged to go off when he opened the door Friday morning to the organization’s West Coast offices on the second floor of a three-story stucco building at 1905

East 17th St. No one was in the office at the time.

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

“So far no group has claimed responsibility,” he said.

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

Second Bombing

Friday’s bombing marked the second time in two months that a regional office of the committee, based in Washington, 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 in that incident 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.

Offices on both sides of the damaged building, as well as the California School of Court Reporting across the street, were evacuated as deputies with the Orange County sheriff’s bomb squad entered the building three times from 10:30 a.m. to 1:20 p.m., when the location was declared safe.

Odeh, interviewed on the 11 p.m. KABC-Channel 7 news, had said that he was convinced the PLO had no involvement in the hijacking of the Italian cruise ship.

Victim Quoted on TV

“I think the media mistakenly linked this incident with the PLO,” Odeh had said. “As far as I know, Arafat did an excellent job and we commend Arafat for his positive role in solving this issue. 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.”

Odeh also had appeared as a pro-Arab spokesman on a Cable News Network broadcast that was taped Thursday afternoon and aired Thursday evening.

FBI spokesman Hoos said the bureau has no evidence linking Odeh’s remarks to the bombing. Hoos said that it will take some time before investigators are able to determine when the bomb was placed in the offices.

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?’ ”

Hind Baki, Odeh’s administrative assistant, said she was the one who normally opens the office every morning, but Friday she was doing an errand for Odeh before work. “Alex usually didn’t come in until 10 or so,” she said.

The 5-year-old national committee is a service organization for people of Arab descent. The group has more than 13,000 members in about 70 chapters nationwide. The Santa Ana office was opened four years ago.

James Abourezk, national chairman of the committee, said in a telephone interview that he believed the bombing could have been 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.

Such a “lynch-mob” atmosphere signals that “to go ahead and to kill some Arabs, it’s OK,” he said. People who are “mentally unbalanced, simple-minded” take their cues from the “cowboy” mood set by President Reagan and the committee’s offices become a target, Abourezk said.

Jewish Leaders React

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.

“We expect and implore local authorities to apprehend and prosecute those responsible for this outrageous act,” said King, a rabbi at Shir Ha-Ma’Alot, a reform Jewish congregation in Newport Beach.

Theodore R. Mann, president of the American Jewish Congress in New York, said: “We condemn the act of violence against the Arab American Anti-Discrimination Committee office in Santa Ana, Calif. We extend our condolences and sympathies to the families of those killed and wounded by this inexcusable act of terrorism. No political disagreement, no matter how critical or deeply felt, justifies attacks on those engaged in peaceful and lawful pursuits.

‘Revulsion, Anger’

“This bombing must not detract from our revulsion and anger over the acts of piracy and murder that took place this week on the Achille Lauro. On the contrary, this latest offense against decency underscores the need for rigorous measures against terrorists, no matter who they are or whom they strike.”

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.

No Warning

Committee head Abourezk said that there was no warning of a bombing in the Santa Ana case, but he added: “Our office out there (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 the 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.”

FBI spokesman Hoos declined to comment. But an FBI spokesman in Washington said that 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.

David Habib, a Thousand Oaks lawyer and president of the Los Angeles chapter of the Arab-American committee, said chapter members had been concerned about attacks, but “there’s not a whole lot you can do.”

‘So Much Smoke’

“We are an information-disseminating organization, and we’re not involved in bombing and killing people. We can’t even put on a banquet without being harassed by certain people,” Habib said.

One of those injured in the blast, Bonnie Bingham, 24, a Teachers Insurance employee and Santa Ana resident, 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 she was shaky and suffered from headaches. She said she did not remember at first how she got down from the second floor of the building. She said she later recalled that a man from another building had 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 in a car and drove themselves to the hospital.

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

Heard Loud Noise

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.” Lawrence said she was not hurt in the blast but went to the hospital because paramedics “wanted to make sure everybody was OK.”

Linda Bullard, 34, of Irvine, who was attending a court reporting class 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.”

The injured were: Bingham; Lawrence; Diane Kropps, 30, of Tustin; Earl Beeghley, 52, of Orange; Laura Sickles, age unknown, of Norwalk, and Johannah Phillips, 45, of Huntington Beach. The only injured person who was not in one of the two offices was identified as Mary Molina Del Carmen, 38, of Santa Ana.

Odeh taught Middle East history and Arabic at Coastline College and served as president of the Council of Arab-American Organizations in Southern California. He wrote a book of poetry, “Whispers in Exile.” A second book of poetry is to be published shortly.

He is survived by his wife, Norma, and three daughters: Helena, 7; Samia, 5, and Suzanne, 2.

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