The parents of Malki Roth, the 15-year-old American killed at the Sbarro pizzeria in Jerusalem in August 2001, sued Ahlam Tamimi in federal court on Tuesday, 25 years after the suicide bombing.
The civil complaint, filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, seeks compensatory damages under the Anti-Terrorism Act. The Roth family also requested a jury trial.
Mark Goldfeder, director of the National Jewish Advocacy Center, which is representing the Roth family, told JNS that the suit was filed to coincide with the 25th anniversary of Roth’s murder. The bombing killed 16 people and wounded about 120 others.
According to the complaint, Tamimi selected the crowded restaurant as the bombing target, helped arrange for the explosives to be concealed in a guitar case and escorted the suicide bomber from Ramallah to Jerusalem on Aug. 9, 2001.
“Malki’s murder was the intended result of the operation that defendant personally planned, guided and set in motion,” and Tamimi “directed the bomber to detonate where it would cause the greatest carnage,” the complaint states.
Tamimi pleaded guilty in an Israeli court in 2003 and was sentenced to 16 life terms. Israel released her in October 2011 as part of a prisoner-exchange deal with Hamas that secured the release of Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit. She subsequently moved to Jordan.
The United States charged Tamimi in 2013 with conspiring to use a weapon of mass destruction against U.S. nationals abroad, resulting in death. The charges were unsealed in 2017, when the U.S. Department of Justice also sought her extradition from Jordan and the FBI placed her on its Most Wanted Terrorists list. Jordan has refused to extradite her.
Goldfeder told JNS that “extradition is for the criminal case” but that “suits against absent foreign terrorists proceed in absentia all the time.”
“If she defaults, which she almost certainly will, plaintiffs move for default and then prove up damages, typically through affidavits, expert testimony on the attack and the family’s losses, and the Israeli conviction record,” he said.
“A judgment against her personally can be executed against any assets she has or acquires within reach of U.S. process, registered in other jurisdictions where enforcement treaties permit and potentially satisfied through the Terrorism Risk Insurance Act if blocked assets attributable to her or to Hamas as her principal can be identified, though the agency and attribution questions there require their own analysis,” he stated.
“The judgment also sits and waits,” Goldfeder told JNS. “It accrues post-judgment interest, it follows her if she travels to any jurisdiction that will recognize it, and it forecloses her from ever monetizing her celebrity through any channel that touches the American financial system.”
