The US is allowing a female Palestinian terrorist to restate her case in court in an attempt to overturn her conviction of immigration fraud.
A judge in Detroit on Tuesday ordered a new trial for a female Palestinian terrorist who was granted US citizenship without disclosing her conviction for bombing attacks in Israel decades ago.
Rasmea Yousef Odeh, 69, will be allowed to show that she suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder when she was interviewed in Detroit during the citizenship process in 2004, a state which allegedly led to her concealing of her past terrorist activities.
Federal Judge Gershwin Drain did not allow the evidence during Odeh’s initial trial.
In 2014, she was convicted of lying to get US citizenship and immigration fraud and was sentenced to 18 months in prison.
A US appeals court earlier this year threw out her conviction because the evidence was not allowed during the trial. She was freed during her appeal.
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.
She was also found guilty of being a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) terror organization.
A pro-Palestinian activist and affiliated with the Arab American Action Network in Chicago, she spent 10 years in prison before being released in a prisoner exchange with the PFLP in 1980.
Odeh was stripped of her US citizenship and, if unsuccessful at her retrial, will be deported from the US to Jordan once she is done serving her time.
By: World Israel News Staff
With files from AP