Twenty-eight years ago, more than 1,000 people gathered at a Catholic church in Orange to mourn Alex Odeh, a Palestinian American civil rights leader who was killed when a pipe bomb ripped apart his Santa Ana offices.

Odeh, who was 41 and the father of three, was remembered as a gentle, peaceful man, "an American in the highest sense of the word," as former U.S. Sen. James Abourezk (D-S.D.), who spoke at the funeral, put it. The White House condemned the killing as an act of terrorism. The FBI told Congress that solving the murder was one of its highest priorities.

But nearly three decades on, the killing remains unsolved.

Now, civil rights groups and members of Congress, including Rep. Loretta Sanchez (D-Santa Ana), are calling on the FBI to do more to solve the case.

http://www.latimes.com/local/la-me-alex-odeh-20131021,0,5616296.story

last year, it was 30 years cold...


Australia reopens terror case after reportedly interviewing bomber in U.S. jail


By Dan GoldbergAugust 26, 2012 8:29am


SYDNEY (JTA) – Australian counterterror agents have reopened an investigation into the bombings of the Israeli Consulate and a Jewish social club in Sydney 30 years ago.

In the first Australian counterterror cold case ever to be reopened, police confirmed Saturday that they had established a special strike force called Operation Forbearance to investigate the two bombings on Dec. 23, 1982.

Detectives traveled in May to an American jail to interrogate a prime suspect, Jordanian-born Palestinian Mohammed Rashid, local media reported. But the police at a news conference Sunday neither confirmed nor denied whether members of Operation Forbearance had interviewed him.


Read more: http://www.jta.org/2012/08/26/news-opinion/world/australia-reopens-terror-case-after-reportedly-interviewing-bomber-in-u-s-jail#ixzz2iP78w69q

http://electronicintifada.net/content/twenty-years-later-still-no-charges-alex-odeh-assassination/6582

In September 2005, one strand of the mystery was tied up when U.S. District Judge Ronald S.W. Lew sentenced Earl Krugel, a 63-year-old former dental assistant from Reseda, to 20 years in prison for conspiring to bomb the King Fahd Mosque in Culver City and assassinate Rep. Darrell E. Issa (R-Vista), a congressman of Lebanese descent. Following sentencing, defense attorney Jay Lichtman told reporters that Krugel had supplied investigators with four names in connection with the Odeh killing. The names, Krugel said, had been mentioned by the late Irv Rubin — Krugel’s co-conspirator, who committed suicide last year by slashing his throat with a razor blade and leaping from a walkway inside the federal Metropolitan Detention Center in Los Angeles.

Strangely, just three days after arriving at the Federal Correctional Institution in Phoenix, Ariz. (in Nov., 2005), Krugel was murdered in an exercise yard by another prisoner.

After Krugel’s death, his wife suggested his killing was related to Odeh’s assassination.

“It was all about Alex Odeh and my husband did not know anything about Alex Odeh,” Lola Krugel told the Associated Press.

In 1985, Rubin was chairman of the Jewish Defense League, a group of radical pro-Israelis listed as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Following Odeh’s killing, Rubin openly gloated about the Palestinian-born American’s death, telling the Los Angeles Times, “No Jew or American should shed one tear for the destruction of a P.L.O. front in Santa Ana or anywhere else in the world.”

Rubin was arrested in 2002 after the FBI recorded Krugel and others plotting “a wake-up call” for Arab Americans by destroying one of their “filthy mosques,” according to court records.

Before his suicide, Rubin told Krugel that four men had been involved in the Odeh killing. Investigators haven’t released the names, but Sami Odeh believes they include three names previously listed by the FBI as suspects: Robert Manning, Keith Fuchs and Andy Green.

Fuchs and Green continue to reside in (relative) safely at Kiryat Araba, a Jewish settlement near Hebron in the occupied West Bank. All three were disciples of the late Rabbi Meir Kahane, the rabidly anti-Arab founder of the JDL.

The presumed mastermind of the Odeh killing, Manning fled to Israel immediately after the Santa Ana incident. He was extradited to the U.S. in 1993, where he was convicted of the 1980 killing of Patricia Wilkerson, a Manhattan Beach secretary who had the misfortune of opening a package bomb aimed at Manning’s estranged business associate. (Manning’s fingerprints were found on the package by investigators.)

It wasn’t the first time Manning had been caught tinkering with explosives, however. In 1972, he was convicted of bombing the Hollywood home of Palestinian activist Mohammed Shaath.