Germany Frees Hijacker Who Killed U.S. Sailor
nytimes.com
By RICHARD BERNSTEIN
Published: December 20, 2005
BERLIN, Dec. 20 - A German parole board has released a Lebanese man convicted 16 years ago of killing an American Navy diver during the 1985 hijacking of a T.W.A. jetliner, a spokeswoman for the Frankfurt prosecutor's office said today.
Associated Press
Mohammed Ali Hamadi, seen in an undated photograph, has been paroled after 19 years for a deadly 1985 hijacking.
The man, Mohammed Ali Hamadi, who was arrested at the Frankfurt Airport in January 1987, was found guilty in a trial in 1989 of the murder of Robert Dean Stethem, a 23-year-old from Waldorf, Md., whose body was then dumped onto the tarmac.
Mr. Hamadi's release, which took place Thursday, came only a couple of days before a German archaeologist, Susanne Osthoff, was freed by a group that took her hostage in Iraq three weeks ago, but German officials denied any connection between the two cases.
The prosecution spokeswoman, Doris Möller-Scheu, said Mr. Hamadi's release came after he had served 19 years in prison in Germany and was the result of a normal, mandatory parole board review of his detention.
Ms. Moller-Scheu said the parole board in Frankfurt made its decision about Mr. Hamadi at the end of November this year after reviewing evaluations from the prison itself, a psychologist, and the prosecutor's office.
"Everything was O.K. with him, the prison evaluation, the psychologist's and the prosecutor's," Ms. Moller-Scheu said, explaining the reasons for the decision to grant Mr. Hamadi parole.
Ms. Moller-Scheu said she did not know where Mr. Hamadi had gone, but Reuters reported from Beirut today that he had returned to Lebanon.
At the time of his arrest in 1987, the United States asked for Mr. Hamadi's extradition, but Germany turned the request down, reportedly out a concern for the safety of two German businessmen being held hostage in Lebanon. The businessmen were subsequently released.
At the time of Mr. Hamadi's conviction by a Frankfurt court in what was then West Germany, the United States expressed satisfaction at the outcome of the case, with the White House spokesman at the time, Marlin Fitzwater, saying, "'Hamadei's sentence to life imprisonment satisfies the demand of justice and confirms that no cause or grievance excuses terrorism."
"We expect that Hamadei will serve the full sentence in accord with German law," Mr. Fitzwater said. Mrs. Hamadi's name has been transcribed from Arabic sometimes as Hamadi, sometimes as Hamadei.
When he was arrested while in transit at Frankfurt Airport, Mr. Hamadi was found to be carrying three bottles of a chemical explosive in his luggage. In his trial, he was found guilty of the beating and murder of Mr. Stethem and also of participating in the savage beatings of two other passengers on the hijacked airplane, and he was sentenced to the maxiumum term allowable under West German law, life imprisonment.
Normally in Germany, parole can be requested for people serving life sentences after 15 years in prison, but subsequent to Mr. Hamadi's conviction, a court ruled that he would be eligible for parole only after serving 19 years.
In fact, given his release last week, he served a few weeks less than 19 years, including his time in prison before and during his trial.
His case was closely watched at the time in large part because the hijacking of the T.W.A. flight 847, flying from Athens to Rome, came to be seen as a defining moment in the emergence of terrorism as a weapon by militant Arabs fighting against Israel and against American influence in the Middle East.
The hijacked plane, whose captain, John Testrake, became a hero in the United States because of his coolness under extreme pressure, twice flew back and forth between Algiers and Beirut before the 39 hostages being held were released at the end of the 17-day ordeal.
During the trial, no witness testified to having seen which of the hijackers fired the gun that killed Mr. Stethem, and Mr. Hamadi, who was 22 at the time of the hijacking, claimed that the murder was carried out by another hijacker. But witnesses said they saw Mr. Hamadi holding the murder weapon both before and after Mr. Stethem was killed, helped to blindfold and beat Mr. Stethem and ridiculed the victim. |
