Rasmea Yousef Odeh, who lied about her past imprisonment for terror when filing for US citizenship in 2004, will be deported.
A Chicago-based Palestinian activist who, when filing for US citizenship in 2004, hid the fact that she had served time in Israeli prison, will be deported to Jordan. She was stripped of her citizenship.
Rasmea Yousef Odeh was sentenced to life in prison in Israel for her involvement in two terrorist bombings in Jerusalem in 1969, one of which took place in a crowded supermarket and killed two people, 21-year-old Leon Kanner and 22-year-old Eddie Joffe, and wounded nine others. A second bomb found at the supermarket was defused.
Four days later, she bombed and damaged the British consulate in Tel Aviv.
A member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) terror organization, she spent 10 years in an Israeli jail before being released in a prisoner exchange with the PFLP in 1980.
Odeh insists she didn’t disclose her past in 2004 because she was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), claiming she had been tortured into confessing to her role in the bombings.
Odeh was scheduled to face a second trial in Detroit. She won an appeal in 2014, after being convicted of immigration fraud and sentenced to 18 months in prison. A US appeals court in 2016 overturned the conviction because evidence related to her claim of suffering from PTSD was not allowed during the trial. She was freed during her appeal.
A member of her legal team, William Goodman, said Thursday that she now agreed to plead guilty on April 25 in exchange for no time in prison.
Odeh is 69 years old, and another trial would be “grinding” for her, Goodman argued.
Odeh, affiliated with the Arab American Action Network in Chicago, was an organizer of the anti-Trump “A Day Without a Woman” protests on March 8.
By: AP and World Israel News Staff