After 20 years, family close to justice for murdered Malki
Malki Roth was killed in a bomb attack 20 years ago on Monday – and finally it appears that there will soon be justice for her family.
Justice is inching closer for murdered Melbourne girl Malki Roth, 20 years to the day since she was killed. The woman who arranged her murder, Ahlam Tamimi, now 41, has been living free in Jordan for a decade.
Malki was just 15 on August 9, 2001, when terrorists planted a bomb at her favourite pizza restaurant on a busy road in Jerusalem, where she lived with her parents and siblings.
Tamimi had scouted the site and taken note of its busiest time so as to murder as many Jewish youngsters as possible. As planned, her accomplice bomber was killed. And so were 15 innocents, seven of them children, and a five-month pregnant American. One victim lies in a coma to this day.
The death count disappointed Tamimi. “Can’t say that I was happy,” she said later.
After the attack, Tamimi boarded a bus, but was too shy to admit her role as Arabs celebrated around her. “Everybody was congratulating one another … three people were killed … two minutes later, they said on the radio that the number had increased to five. I wanted to hide my smile, but I just couldn’t. Allah be praised, it was great. As the number of dead kept rising, the passengers applauded.”
Tamimi was arrested within weeks, tried, admitted guilt, convicted and given 16 life sentences. But she was later included in the controversial 2011 deal to swap captured Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit for 1027 Palestinian and Israeli Arab prisoners. The former journalism student has become a television star in her homeland.
Since then, Malki’s father, Melbourne-born lawyer Arnold Roth, has been seeking justice for his murdered daughter by having her extradited to the US. Malki’s mother is American, and Malki shared citizenship there. But neither the Australian nor US governments have pushed the case.
Questions asked of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade received what Roth family supporters believe to be only cursory responses, and, it appeared, an extradition treaty between the US and Jordan was never ratified.
That was the story until very recently. The US Justice Department indicted Tamimi in 2013 claiming she was “an unrepentant terrorist who admitted to her role in a deadly bombing that killed numerous victims”, including two Americans”.
But Jordan’s highest court insisted in 2017 the extradition treaty between the Jordan and the US was never ratified.
Meanwhile, a confident Tamimi always maintained her guilt with a calm, psychopathic indifference. “I do not regret what happened,” she said on television. “Absolutely not … Allah granted me success. Do you want me to denounce what I did? That’s out of the question. I would do it again today, and in the same manner.”
But in recent days Mr Roth has managed to secure documentation from the US State Department confirming an extradition treaty between Jordan and the US was indeed signed in Washington on March 28, 1995, and came into force on July 29 that year.
Malki’s family and supporters are now pressuring US President Joe Biden to act quickly.
Speaking from Israel on Sunday, Mr Roth expressed disappointment at the impotent Australian response. He wrote to Scott Morrison about Malki’s case early this year. He said the Minister for Foreign Affairs responded “there may be legal impediments to the case including that the Jordanian constitution prohibits the extradition of Jordanian nationals”.
“That’s simply untrue, even according to the Jordanians,” Mr Roth said. “Exactly 20 years ago, we swore to ourselves we would not let Malki become a statistic. Seeing justice done was always at the heart of that mission and still is.
“But after years of pushing back against walls of official silence, bureaucratic apathy and contrived excuses for inaction, we hope for better, especially from Australia.”
Potentially, Tamimi could face execution in the US, but the Roths do not want that, nor for that to be an impediment for her extradition.
Their goal has always been to see her grow old behind bars.