The_Info_Web/10 - PEOPLE/(H-M)/Nezar Hindawi.md

aliases	category	tags	summary	born	location	relations	created	updated
Nezar Hindawi Nizar Hindawi Nezar Nawaf Mansour Hindawi Nezar al-Hindawi	Extremism & Violent Networks	Person ElAlPlot Heathrow Syria SyrianIntelligence Mossad BenMenashe Jordan OldBailey Parole	Jordanian citizen of Palestinian origin convicted in 1986 of attempting to bomb an El Al airliner at Heathrow, sentenced to 45 years; a 2011 court judgment called him an agent of the Syrian government.	1954	Baqura, Jordan	type with role start fn participant_in El Al Heathrow bomb plot convicted of attempting to place the bomb aboard the aircraft 1986-04-17 1 type with role start fn participant_in Syrian Air Force Intelligence recruited and instructed by officers of the service, per a 1986 CIA note 1986-01 7 type with role start fn reported_to Haitham Said Syrian Air Force Intelligence officer who gave him a passport and the flight details, per a 1986 CIA note 1986-02 7 type with role fn member_of Baath Party reported member of the Jordanian branch 6 type with role fn relative_of Ahmad Hasi full brother 6 type with role start fn participant_in Mohammed al-Khuli Air Force Intelligence chief named in Hindawi's revised police account, per Seale 1986-01 5 type with role fn relative_of Mohammed Radi Abdullah cousin, per Ben-Menashe 4 type with role start fn partner_of Ann-Marie Murphy girlfriend, later described as fiancee in court records 1985 6 type with role start fn participant_in Rafael Eitan named by Ben-Menashe as the orchestrator of the plot 1986-01 4	2025-08-05	2026-10-15

Nezar Hindawi is a Jordanian citizen of Palestinian origin who was convicted at the Old Bailey on October 24, 1986, of attempting to place a bomb aboard an El Al Boeing 747 at Heathrow Airport on April 17, 1986.¹² He was sentenced to 45 years' imprisonment. The same day, the Foreign Secretary, Geoffrey Howe, told the House of Commons that there was "conclusive evidence of Syrian official involvement with Hindawi" and that Britain was breaking diplomatic relations with Syria.³ A 2011 judgment of the High Court describes Hindawi as having acted "as an agent of the Syrian Government."¹ The former Israel intelligence officer Ari Ben-Menashe wrote in 1992 that the plot was an Israeli operation conceived by Rafael Eitan to discredit Syria, and that Hindawi was recruited for it by his cousin, Mohammed Radi Abdullah.⁴ The British writer Patrick Seale concluded in 1989 that a Syrian agency, most probably Air Force Intelligence, was involved, and also that Hindawi was most probably an agent provocateur controlled by Israel.⁵

Early life

Hindawi was born in 1954 in Baqura, Jordan. An offender manager's report, quoted in the 2012 judgment, states that "Mr Hindawi was involved with the PLO from the age of 12yrs" and "was also involved with the Jordanian Revolutionary Movement."² In June 1986 the Washington Post reporter David B. Ottaway described him as a sometime journalist in London and Jordan, and reported that he was said to have belonged to the Jordanian branch of the Syrian-backed Baath Party.⁶

The plot

A Central Intelligence Agency note of November 1986 reports that Hindawi travelled to Syria in January 1986 seeking funding for a new group, the Jordanian Revolutionary Movement. According to the note, in February Haitham Said, identified there as second in command of Syrian Air Force Intelligence, told him of the plan to place a bomb aboard an El Al flight from London, gave him an official Syrian passport in a false name, and specified the flight. The note adds that Said allegedly promised him $250,000 after the operation.⁷ The same note names Mohammed al-Khuli, head of Air Force Intelligence, as the officer who probably cleared the operation.⁷ A June 1986 CIA assessment recorded that Libya had reportedly failed to fund Hindawi's proposed group before he went to Damascus alone.⁸

Howe told the Commons that Hindawi travelled on an official Syrian passport in a false name, that two of his visa applications were backed by official notes from the Syrian Foreign Ministry, and that he met the Syrian ambassador, Dr. Loutof Haydar, in the embassy after the device was discovered. Howe also cited trial evidence that Hindawi had stayed in hotel accommodation reserved for Syrian Arab Airlines crew, and had spent the night after the attempt in Syrian embassy accommodation, where hair clippings and hair dye were found.³ Howe said the Syrian government's claim that its staff had dealt with Hindawi "throughout as a bona fide journalist" was "frankly incredible."³

The 2011 judgment summarises the 1986 facts as Hindawi acting "at the instigation of the Government of Syria and with the assistance of its officials, including diplomats in London." He provided his Irish girlfriend, Ann-Marie Murphy, then pregnant with his child, with a bag for a journey to Israel. Unknown to her, the bag held explosives and a timing device set to detonate at 39,000 feet over Austria, with the result, the judgment states, that the 375 people on board would have been killed.¹

Seale, drawing on the trial and on British and Syrian sources, gives the sequence of the day. An Israeli security guard at Heathrow found 1.5 kilograms of Czechoslovak-made Semtex in the false bottom of the bag shortly after 9 a.m. on April 17, with a detonator disguised as a pocket calculator that Hindawi had primed in the taxi by inserting a battery. Hindawi returned to a room at the Royal Garden Hotel in Kensington reserved for Syrian Arab Airlines personnel, boarded the airline's crew bus for a 2 p.m. Damascus flight, and got off when news of the discovery broke. He went to the Syrian embassy in Belgrave Square and told the ambassador, Dr. Lutfallah Haydar, that he was in trouble. Embassy security men took him to their lodgings in West Kensington and cut and dyed his hair. Early on April 18 he went to the London Visitors Hotel in Holland Park, where his brother, a clerk in the medical section of the Qatar embassy, persuaded him to give himself up.⁵

Seale wrote that Hindawi was interrogated for two days at Paddington Green Police Station, first saying he believed the bag held narcotics, and that "after his sleep was deliberately interrupted several times during the night, he changed his story." In the revised account he met Air Force Intelligence chief General Muhammad al-Khuly and Colonel Haytham Sa'id in Damascus in January 1986, received from Sa'id a Syrian service passport in the name "Issam Share," made a practice trip to Britain, returned to London on April 5, and was handed the bag at the Royal Garden Hotel by a man he took to be an airline official.⁵

Ben-Menashe's account gives a different origin and handover. He wrote that Colonel Mohammed Radi Abdullah, a Jordanian army officer who had emigrated to London, was recruited in 1978, with a £200,000 loan from an Israeli source, into an antiterrorist group run by Rafi Eitan. In 1986, he wrote, Radi was involved in "the well-documented attempt to blow up an El Al plane. Or at least what was publicly perceived to be an attempt. In fact, it was a cold, calculated plan conceived by Rafi Eitan to discredit the Syrians." At a secret meeting in Paris, according to Ben-Menashe, Eitan told Radi he wanted to implicate the Syrian Embassy in London in terrorism and have all Syrian diplomats thrown out of England. Radi, whom Ben-Menashe names as Hindawi's cousin, approached Hindawi, who was friendly with the Syrian Air Force intelligence attache in London, and offered him $50,000: "This money I'm offering you ... is from our Syrian brothers on behalf of the Palestinians. We want to blow up a Zionist plane." Ben-Menashe wrote that Hindawi was instructed to make sure his girlfriend boarded the flight and expected her to die in the explosion, and that in the El Al departure lounge an Israeli security man dressed in casual clothes passed her the parcel. Of Radi he wrote: "Radi was not implicated. He was under MI-5 protection. As a result, Margaret Thatcher closed down the Syrian Embassy in London. Rafi Eitan had had his way, Hindawi was jailed for 45 years."⁴ The Washington Post's June 1986 reporting placed the same case the other way, noting that British police gave more credence to Hindawi's claims of Syrian involvement than the Foreign Office did.⁶

Trial and sentence

Howe told the Commons on October 24 that the trial of Hindawi at the Central Criminal Court "ended today."³ Hindawi was convicted that day. At the trial in October 1986 he retracted the account he had given the police and claimed to be the victim of a conspiracy possibly mounted by Israeli agents. Seale reported that he alleged Detective Sergeant Will Price had threatened to turn him over to Mossad, and that the police had made up his statements and forced him to sign them unread.⁵ Lord Lane, the Lord Chief Justice, refused leave to appeal the sentence, describing the plot as "about as foul and as horrible a crime as could possibly be imagined," and writing that "the sentence of 45 years imprisonment was not a day too long."¹

In May 1986, after Hindawi's arrest, the government had demanded the withdrawal of three Syrian embassy attachés, and the Syrian government declined to waive their immunity so that the police could question them.³ On October 24, Howe announced that the Syrian ambassador, Dr. Haydar, had been told to close the Syrian Embassy in London and leave the country within 14 days, and that the British embassy in Damascus would also close.³ The Margaret Thatcher government also imposed stricter searches on Syrian Arab Airlines aircraft, crew, passengers and baggage in London.³ President Ronald Reagan issued a statement the same day backing the British decision and crediting the vigilance of those responsible for security at Heathrow with preventing the attack.⁹

Syrian involvement and the rival account

On October 20, 1986, Hafez al-Assad told Time magazine that Israeli intelligence had planned the operation and arranged for it to be uncovered "at the plane's doorstep."⁵ Seale listed the evidence for a Syrian role: the official Syrian passport in a false name; Syrian Foreign Ministry support for Hindawi's two visa applications in February and April 1986, the second submitted by a locally recruited clerk at the British embassy in Damascus while the consul who signed the first was away; the airline cover; a message from Ambassador Haydar recommending Hindawi to Syrian intelligence, which British intelligence had apparently intercepted in 1985; hair and dye traces in the security men's flat; and pre-trial attempts to contact Damascus. Seale wrote that Assad and Prime Minister Kasm "knew nothing about the operation until they heard the news on the radio," the considered judgment of American and European officials. General al-Khuly, head of Air Force Intelligence since 1963, was moved to deputy commander of the air force in October 1987, "in the wake of the Hindawi affair."⁵

Seale then wrote: "There is some evidence to suggest that Hindawi, and indeed his brother Hasi in West Germany, were double agents who worked for Syria while in fact being controlled by Israel. Hindawi was most probably an agent provocateur whose mission was to entrap the Syrian intelligence services so as to smear Syria as a terrorist state." He added that if so the bomb "was never intended to go off and its discovery was not an accident." Seale cited Ian Black of The Guardian, who was told by a senior Israeli security source in Jerusalem that Israeli intelligence had received an advance general warning of an attack on El Al.⁵ Seale also reported the findings of a Syrian-Jordanian post-mortem: the family were Palestinians settled in the East Jordan village of Baqura, "with a history of involvement with Mossad"; Hindawi's father had worked as a cook at the Jordanian embassy in London until found to be an Israeli agent, was sentenced to death in absentia in Jordan, and remained in Britain; Hindawi stored the bag and explosives in his father's flat for ten days in April 1986. "According to Syrian and Jordanian sources, Israel used the threat that his father would be sent back to Jordan to win Hindawi's co-operation." A senior Jordanian official said Hindawi had done a job for Mossad "and been paid for it," had worked for Jordan against the Palestinians, for Syria against Jordan and for the clandestine Jordanian Communist party, and had been refused a passport renewal by Jordan in 1985. Assad told Seale: "It was not an operation which could have been carried out behind the backs of British intelligence."⁵ Charles Glass published a related inquiry, "Who Was Hindawi Working For?", in The Spectator on November 1, 1986.¹⁰

The CIA's June 1986 Terrorism Review concluded that Syrian officials were directly involved in planning and execution of both the London operation and the bombing in Berlin, and described the two principals as "freelance terrorists" who had worked with Syrian officials.⁸ Ottaway reported in June 1986 that Western antiterrorism experts believed Syrian Air Force Intelligence was directly involved in handling both Hindawi and his brother, and that Foreign Office officials remained skeptical that the Syrian government had planned the operation or ordered it.⁶ Ottaway also recorded an unnamed Reagan administration source's account that Hafez al-Assad had told King Hussein that Syrian intelligence had contacts with Hindawi but regarded him as too unstable to use, and that Syrian embassy officials in London refused to take Hindawi in after the failed attempt.⁶ That account sits against the Howe statement that Hindawi spent the night after the attempt in Syrian embassy accommodation.³

In November 1986 The Washington Times reported an interview in which Jacques Chirac relayed what Helmut Kohl and Hans-Dietrich Genscher had told him: that the London attempt was a provocation organized jointly by Mossad and renegade elements in Assad's entourage, whose objective was to embarrass Assad and bring down his regime. Chirac, who did not wish to be quoted directly, is also reported to have said that some of Assad's enemies, foreign and domestic, might be manipulating some of the Syrian agents against him.¹¹ On November 25, 1986, the Syrian ambassador to East Germany suggested in an interview that Mossad was responsible for the West Berlin bombing.¹²

The Christian Science Monitor reported in October 1986 that on February 4 Israel had intercepted a Libyan airliner bound for Damascus and forced it to land in Israel, and that it was carrying Abdullah Ahmar, the second-ranking official of Syria's ruling Baath Party, along with other officials. Syrian leaders vowed revenge. The correspondent Jim Muir quoted analysts who suggested the Hindawi attempt might have been a Syrian response, but also noted that trial evidence indicated much of the infrastructure was in place before the February incident.¹³

Berlin bombing

On March 29, 1986, a bomb exploded at the German-Arab Friendship Society in West Berlin, injuring nine people.¹² Hindawi's full brother, Ahmad Hasi (also spelled Hazi), was tried for it. Ottaway reported in June 1986 that Hasi, who used a different surname, had vehemently denied any role in the bombing of the La Belle discotheque in West Berlin on April 5, 1986.⁶ A CIA note of November 1986 reports that Hasi confirmed Hindawi's trip to Syria in January and said Hindawi had arranged for him to collect the device used in the Friendship Society bombing from the Syrian embassy in East Berlin.⁷

On November 26, 1986, a West Berlin court convicted Hasi and Farouk Salameh, a second Jordanian, and sentenced them to 14 and 13 years. Presiding judge Hans-Joachim Heinze said that the only evidence for official Syrian involvement was the defendants' pre-trial confessions, and that the court found the accusations credible because other details of their accounts had been confirmed. Shortly before the verdicts, West Berlin justice officials issued an arrest warrant for a man identified at trial as a Syrian intelligence officer, known as Abu Ahmed, reported to be Lt. Col. Haitham Saed, deputy intelligence chief of Syria's Air Force.¹² According to the confessions, Hindawi, Hasi and Salameh first travelled to Libya to seek backing and netted $5,000. They then turned to Syria, and were assigned the Friendship Society bombing as a test. Hasi said the Syrian embassy in East Berlin supplied the bomb, which failed to explode in two attempts before going off on the third, on March 29.¹⁴

Parole and judicial review

Hindawi became eligible for parole in 2001. A deportation order to Jordan had been made against him on November 13, 2000, and he did not appeal it.¹

On October 12, 2009, a Parole Board panel recommended his release on terms that he be deported immediately to Jordan. On November 23, 2009, the National Offender Management Service wrote rejecting the recommendation, and the Justice Secretary, Jack Straw, decided the question on the papers. The High Court later found that those papers "did not put a balanced case; they only put the case for rejecting the decision of the Parole Board and no case as to why he should accept it." On April 1, 2011, the court quashed the 2009 decision, holding that it did not set out proper reasons for rejecting the Board's finding that Hindawi was a credible witness.¹

A later Parole Board panel, chaired by Mr Justice Butterfield, considered his case in late 2011 and declined release. The 2012 judgment quotes the offender manager's report as stating that "the risk posed by Mr Hindawi would be due to future involvement in politically motivated terrorist activity."² Permission to bring a further judicial review was refused by Lloyd-Jones J on April 26, 2012, and granted on three of five grounds by Silber J on August 10, 2012. On December 17, 2012, Blake J dismissed the challenge, holding that the Board's overall conclusions were "rational and lawful on the information before it," while recording his concern that relevant information had not been before the Board.²

The 2012 judgment describes Hindawi as 57 years old and in poor health. It records that he was eligible for parole after a third of his sentence, must be released after two-thirds, an event due in June 2016 unless he was released earlier on licence, and that the Secretary of State for the Home Department intended to deport him to Jordan on completion of the sentence.² Press reports after the later Parole Board decision gave the same automatic release date of 2016, with deportation to Jordan to follow.¹⁵

Footnotes

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1. [2011] EWHC 830 (QB), Hindawi, R (on the application of) v Secretary of State for Justice, Lord Justice Thomas and Mrs Justice Nicola Davies, Administrative Court, April 1, 2011, paras 1, 3, 4, 5 to 7, 12, 13, 45. https://caselaw.nationalarchives.gov.uk/ewhc/qb/2011/830 ↩︎

2. [2012] EWHC 3894 (Admin), Hindawi v The Parole Board, Blake J, Administrative Court, CO/3217/2012, December 17, 2012, paras 1 to 3, 15, 17, 50. https://caselaw.nationalarchives.gov.uk/ewhc/admin/2012/3894 ↩︎

3. HC Deb 24 October 1986 vol 102 cc1504-14, "Anglo-Syrian Relations," statement by Sir Geoffrey Howe, Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs. https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1986/oct/24/anglo-syrian-relations ↩︎

4. Ari Ben-Menashe, Profits of War: Inside the Secret U.S.-Israeli Arms Network (Sheridan Square Press, 1992; TrineDay, 2015), pp. 121 to 124. ↩︎

5. Patrick Seale with Maureen McConville, Asad of Syria: The Struggle for the Middle East (University of California Press, 1989), "The Hindawi affair," pp. 475 to 481; p. 181 on Khuly. ↩︎

6. David B. Ottaway, "Syrian Connection To Terrorism Probed," Washington Post, June 1, 1986, CIA reading room copy. https://archive.org/details/cia-readingroom-document-cia-rdp90-00965r000604900038-5 ↩︎

7. Central Intelligence Agency, note to the Deputy Director for Intelligence, November 5, 1986, with attached assessment of Syrian, Libyan and Iranian state support for terrorism (CIA-RDP89G00720R000600740004-0). https://archive.org/details/cia-readingroom-document-cia-rdp89g00720r000600740004-0 ↩︎

8. Central Intelligence Agency, Directorate of Intelligence, Terrorism Review, June 1986 (DI TR 86-007, CIA-RDP87T00685R000200360003-6). https://archive.org/details/cia-readingroom-document-cia-rdp87t00685r000200360003-6 ↩︎

9. Ronald Reagan, "United Kingdom-Syria Diplomatic Relations," statement, October 24, 1986, Ronald Reagan Presidential Library. https://www.reaganlibrary.gov/research/speeches/102486e ↩︎

10. Charles Glass, "Who Was Hindawi Working For?", The Spectator, November 1, 1986, cited in Seale, p. 520. ↩︎

11. Arnaud de Berchgrave, "Chirac told Syria was framed," The Washington Times, November 7, 1986 (CIA-RDP90-00965R000201460003-9). https://archive.org/details/cia-readingroom-document-cia-rdp90-00965r000201460003-9 ↩︎

12. "Berlin court deals another blow to Syria," Christian Science Monitor, December 1, 1986, compiled from wire reports. https://www.csmonitor.com/1986/1201/itrial.html ↩︎

13. Jim Muir, "State terror: Syrian links highlighted," Christian Science Monitor, October 27, 1986. https://www.csmonitor.com/1986/1027/oterr.html ↩︎

14. Elizabeth Pond, "West Berlin trial spotlights alleged Syrian terror role," Christian Science Monitor, November 18, 1986. Hasi's and Salameh's pre-trial confessions as reported at trial. https://www.csmonitor.com/1986/1118/ohazi.html ↩︎

15. "Terrorist plotter won't be let out of jail early," The Jewish Chronicle. https://www.thejc.com/news/israel/terrorist-plotter-wont-be-let-out-of-jail-early-fjf10lh6 ↩︎