Pair Wanted in Bombing Held in Israel : Crime: Couple are suspected of killing an Arab-American rights activist in Orange County in 1985.

Acting on a request from U.S. officials, Israeli police Sunday arrested an American-born Jewish couple suspected of killing an Arab-American civil rights activist in Orange County in 1985.

Israeli Radio said Robert and Rochelle Manning, who immigrated to Israel in 1973, were arrested after an American request for their extradition in the murder of Alex M. Odeh in a bombing of the Santa Ana offices of the Arab-American Anti-Discrimination Committee.

Odeh, born in Palestine, was the committee’s West Coast regional director. He suffered the full force of explosives rigged to go off when he opened the door to his offices on the morning of Oct. 11, 1985.

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

The Israeli Radio report said Robert Manning, 38, was known as an activist of the anti-Arab Kach movement founded by Rabbi Meir Kahane, who was assassinated in New York last year. The Mannings live in the Jewish settlement of Kiryat Arba, a stronghold of Kahane supporters next to Hebron in the occupied West Bank.

Rochelle Manning, 50, was arrested in 1988 as she stepped off a plane in Los Angeles with her daughter. She was later indicted in the 1980 bombing death of Patricia Wilkerson, a Manhattan Beach secretary. Robert Manning, a U.S. Army-trained demolitions expert, was also indicted in that case, but he remained in Israel.

The bomb, disguised as a new invention, was addressed to Wilkerson’s employer, Brenda Crouthamel. When the secretary plugged the device which had been mailed to Crouthamel into a wall outlet, it exploded.

Federal prosecutors said Rochelle Manning’s fingerprints were found on a letter accompanying the mail bomb. Robert Manning’s fingerprints were found on the package in which the explosive arrived, prosecutors said.

Federal authorities said William Ross, a millionaire Hawthorne real estate broker who was also indicted, enlisted the Mannings, a couple he met in the Jewish Defense League in 1971, to send the bomb to Crouthamel, a Ross opponent in a business dispute.

The trial ended in a hung jury, and Rochelle Manning returned to Israel when authorities decided not to retry the case.

The Israeli Justice Ministry is examining the U.S. request that the Mannings be extradited, made after new evidence emerged. The couple is scheduled to appear in court for a hearing within two days.

Kach activists said they would mount a campaign to block the extradition, for which there is no legal barrier since the Mannings allegedly committed the crime before they became Israeli citizens.