Case of Arab Accused in Plot to Bomb El Al Jet Goes to Jury

The jury began its deliberations Thursday in the trial of an Arab charged with duping his pregnant Irish girlfriend into carrying a suitcase bomb on an Israeli jetliner.

After a 12 1/2-day hearing, Justice William Mars-Jones handed the case of Jordanian-born Nezar Hindawi, 32, to the seven-man, five-woman jury in the Old Bailey Central Criminal Court.

After half a day of deliberations, the jury retired for the night without reaching a verdict.

Prosecutor Roy Amlot charged that Hindawi had been trained to blow up the jet by Syrian agents and that he had been supplied with three pounds of plastic explosives hidden in a suitcase he gave to his unwitting girlfriend, Ann Marie Murphy, 32.

Amlot said the explosives would have destroyed the El Al Israel Airlines jetliner carrying 375 people, including Murphy, on April 17 after its stopover at London’s Heathrow Airport on a New York-Tel Aviv flight.

Suitcase Bomb

An El Al security man discovered the explosives hidden in the bottom of Murphy’s suitcase as she headed toward the plane at Heathrow. Hindawi was arrested a day later, based on a tip from the owner of the London hotel where he was staying.

“Was ever a woman worse used by a man?” Amlot asked in his closing arguments about the woman who had Hindawi’s child in July. At the time she was given the suitcase bomb, she believed she was on her way to Israel to marry Hindawi, she testified.

Hindawi claimed that he met a man in Syria who recruited him to carry drugs. Later in London, he said, the man gave him a suitcase, which he thought had drugs in it to be smuggled to Israel’s West Bank.

Defense attorney Gilbert Gray said the Mossad, Israel’s intelligence agency, had set up Hindawi in order to place the blame on Syria and said El Al security men switched Murphy’s suitcase at the airport.

Syrian Denial

“Can you imagine a more effective way of landing Syria in the international soup?” he asked the jury.

Syrian President Hafez Assad has denied Syrian involvement and claimed that the case was an Israeli attempt to defame Syria.

Murphy, a slight, soft-spoken woman from Dublin, spent most of her five hours on the stand studiously avoiding Hindawi. But at one point she suddenly stared at him, clenched her fist and shouted, “You bastard, you! How could you do this to me? I hate you.”

Hindawi showed no visible reaction but later declared when he took the stand, “I love her and will love her forever.”