Eight years later no arrests in Gaza murder of American security contractors
Saturday marked eight years since the murders of Mark Parsons and two fellow security guards - John Branchizio and John Linde - by a roadside bomb in Gaza. There has been
no progress in resolving the case.
Those facts are not in dispute. But aside from the certainty that a bomb exploded on Oct. 15, 2003, on a road leading from a checkpoint at the Israeli-Gaza border to a nearby Palestinian refugee camp, and that Parsons perished along with two other Americans, little else is known.
On that day, Mark Parsons was assigned as a security guard to a convoy of three armored SUVs from the U.S. Embassy in Tel Aviv.
Parsons was not a federal agent. He was employed a as a guard for DynCorp., a Virginia-based private security firm that had been hired by the State Department to provide security for embassy officials.
But why was he in Gaza?
Officially, the State Department says he was needed to guard U.S. officials who were on their way to interview Palestinian students who had applied for Fulbright teaching grants. The State Department has never disclosed the names of the U.S. officials who were conducting the interviews - not even their ranks. Nor has |the State Department ever explained why such heavy security was needed for what seemed like a low-key humanitarian and educational mission.
Yes, Gaza can be a volatile place - this columnist has reported from there. Gunfire can punctuate a colorful sunset and bombs can thump in the distance as children play soccer. But in 2003, Gaza was not enveloped in violence in the way it was several years later when Hamas came to power.
So why was Parsons' convoy targeted? And by whom?
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Documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act by the Washington-based Investigative Project on Terrorism show that the FBI and State Department officials tried to respond quickly. A team of seven FBI agents arrived a day after the bombing.
But Palestinian authorities had not secured the crime scene, the documents say. As the agents tried to collect evidence, they were pelted with rocks by Palestinian youths. Fearing they might be harmed, the agents quickly scooped up as much material as they could and left.
The Associated Press reported that the Palestinian crowd chanted "Allahu Akbar" - God is great - as the U.S. agents retreated to their cars surrounded by rifle-toting Palestinian police.
The FBI documents offer no clues about possible suspects. But investigators are quite sure of one critical element of the story: The bomb, containing 150 to 200 pounds of TNT, was set off by a remote control device. In other words, the bombers targeted the convoy.
The rumors here - both at the time and subsequently - pointed to
Mohamed Dahlan, who was then an American favorite among the Fatah leadership, and his assistant,
Rashid Abu Shabak.
Who murdered John Branchizio, Mark Parson, and John Marin Linde? This was written two months after the murders: Shurat HaDin - Israel Law Center Director Nitsana Darshan-Leitner has written to United States Attorney General John Ashcroft alerting him to the fact the Palestinian Security Service commander assigned to investigate the October bombing attack on American personnel in Gaza was very likely the terrorist who planned it.
Gaza Commander Col. Rashid Abu Shabak's has been entrusted by the Palestinian Authority (PA) and the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation with hunting down the terrorist cell responsible for the October 15, 2003 bombing which left three Americans dead.
The three Americans, John Branchizio, 37, of Texas, John Linde Jr., 30, of Missouri, and Mark Parsons, 31, of New Jersey, were security personnel guarding a convoy of diplomatic vehicles which was attacked by Palestinian Arab terrorists who detonated a powerful roadside bomb at the Beit Hanoun junction in Gaza. The Americans were visiting Gaza to interview candidates for Fulbright scholarships.
Darshan-Leitner's letter accuses the Palestinian commander of being the mastermind behind numerous terror attacks perpetrated by Yasser Arafat's Fatah organization in Gaza. Shurat HaDin urges the Department of Justice to investigate Abu Shabak's involvement in prior roadside bombings.
Not surprisingly, there have been no arrests made by the Palestinians in the current investigation.
According to the Shurat HaDin letter, Abu Shabak, a protege of Palestinian leader Mohammed Dahlan, has an extensive terrorist past. Abu Shabak, along with Dahlan are the leading suspects in several other Gaza terror attacks.
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In her letter, Darshan-Leitner writes: "It is a disgraceful that the individual assigned by the Palestinian Authority to investigate the murders of Branchizio, Linde and Parsons is himself a leading terrorist suspected of numerous other roadside bombings in Gaza. If the United States is sincere about making arrests then it must not tolerate Rashid Abu Shabak heading up this crucial inquiry. The similarities between the October 15th roadside bombing and the roadside bombing of the Kfar Darom school bus in November 2000 cannot be ignored. We urge the Department of Justice to initiate its own investigation of Abu Shabak and his role in prior Gaza terror attacks, some of which have seriously injured American citizens."
So now that Condi Clueless is no longer Secretary of State and Mohamed Dahlan has had a falling out with Abu Mazen, maybe the murderers of Mark Parsons and his two colleagues can be brought to justice?
Read the whole thing.
Labels: Gaza, John Branchizio, John Linde, Mark Parsons, Mohamed Dahlan, Rashid Abu Shabak
Family of American terror victim allowed to sue 'Palestinian Authority' in US
On October 15, 2003, a U.S. embassy convoy was on a visit to Gaza to interview 'Palestinian' candidates for Fulbright scholarship programs in the United States. The convoy consisted of three fully armored but unmarked Suburbans. The first vehicle was occupied by the diplomats on the interview mission. The second vehicle was occupied by American contract protective security specialists: John Branchizio (36), John Linde (30), and Mark Parsons (31). The third vehicle had agents of the Diplomatic Security Service on a “route and area familiarization” trip.
Just after the convoy entered the Gaza Strip from the Erez checkpoint, an explosion totally destroyed the second vehicle in the motorcade, killing the three specialists. A U.S. embassy document states that the device appeared to have been “placed under the road and remotely detonated as the vehicles passed.”
The family of Mark Parsons, and particularly
his brother John, have been pursuing justice in Mark's case for nearly eight years. A detailed summary of some of those efforts is
here. On Sunday, the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia overturned a lower court ruling and granted the Parsons family the right to
sue the 'Palestinian Authority' in a civil lawsuit in the United States.
"Although we agree with the district court that the family's conspiracy claim theories are too speculative to survive summary judgment, we believe a reasonable juror could conclude that Palestinian Authority employees provided material support to the bomber," reads the ruling.
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The PA, U.S. and Israeli officials all conducted investigations into the bombing. Documents provided to the Parsons family and included in the suit showed that the PA detained six suspects, including Amer Qarmout, a leader of the Popular Resistance Committee, who admitted that he had dug a hole in that spot to place a bomb and asked guards with the PA National Security Service to ignore the shoveling, which he said they did. However, Qarmout said he never personally planted a bomb.
According to the Investigative Project on Terrorism, which tracks data on "radical Islamic terror groups," the immediate forensics investigation after the bombing reportedly was cut short when Palestinians made their way to the explosion site and started tampering with the scene. According to documents released by the FBI, investigators had stones thrown at their cars as they were leaving the area.
The lower court threw out the Parsons family claim under the Anti-Terrorism Act because it said the family cannot link the PA to a specific bomber. But the appeals court ruled that sufficient evidence existed, including forensic reports that showed the bomb that killed Parsons was made of the same material Qarmont says he uses for bomb-making.
That and other statements and documents are enough to allow the case to go to a jury, the judges ruled.
"Sorting out these contradictions, deciding how much weight to give evidence that supports or undermines the family's case and evaluating how much credibility to assign Qarmout's incriminating versus exculpatory statements are prototypical jury functions that courts may not commandeer," the court ruled.
"In sum, we conclude that a reasonable juror could find on the basis of the family's evidence that Qarmout planted the bomb that killed Parsons and that Palestinian Security forces at the nearby security checkpoint complied with Qarmout's request not to interfere with his effort to plant a bomb," the ruling reads. "Because such acts qualify as providing material support ... we reverse the district court's grant of summary judgment to the Palestinian Authority on the family's material support claim."
The circuit court judges -- Karen LeCraft Henderson, David S. Tatel and Janice Rogers Brown -- were split on several questions posed by the appeal, and reaffirmed the lower court's decision siding for the PA on whether a conspiracy was in the works to target U.S. security personnel.
Though the State Department mentioned the three men who were killed in its 2004 annual report on Patterns of Global Terrorism, IPT said infighting between the FBI and State Department had hampered the investigation.
IPT reported that John Parsons, the brother of Mark Parsons, said he was told in October 2010 that the FBI had closed the case on the deaths of Parsons as well as John Branchizio and John M. Linde Jr., although no perpetrator was ever caught.
The
JPost adds:
In that ruling, the lower court said that it could not hold the PA liable for the "alleged criminal acts of a few employees".
After the bombing, PA security personnel arrested and interrogated six suspects, including Amer Qarmout, a leader of the Popular Resistance Committees (PRC). Qarmout admitted possessing bombs before the explosion that killed Parsons and described the structure of those bombs.
Although both PA and FBI investigations revealed that the bomb that killed Parsons matched in type and structure devices used by the PRC, neither the PA, Israel or the USA have ever publicly identified the bomber responsible for Parsons's death.
One would be astounded at the brazen disregard for American lives by the US government until one realizes that the
United States covered up for 33 years the fact that Yasser Arafat ordered the murders two US diplomats and a Belgian diplomat in Khartoum in 1973.
I was in touch with John Parsons today. His battle is far from over: The 'Palestinian Authority' has plenty of American taxpayer money provided as foreign aid with which it will fight John every step of the way, and more than enough 'do gooder' lawyers who are happy to defend the 'poor Palestinians.' It's simply a disgrace.
Labels: Gaza, John Branchizio, John Linde, John Parsons, Mark Parsons, Palestinian terrorism, Popular Resistance Committee
Saturday marked eight years since the murders of Mark Parsons and two fellow security guards - John Branchizio and John Linde - by a roadside bomb in Gaza. There has been no progress in resolving the case.
