This week marks 40 years since a British court convicted Jordanian citizen Nezar Hindawi of trying to blow up an El Al jet carrying about 370 people. They jailed him for 45 years, then the longest determinate sentence ever passed by a British court. The anniversary would pass unremarked but for an admission that the British government confirms that Hindawi was released in 2013, 18 years before his full term, without license conditions, no supervision, and no formal announcement. While there was a minor mention at the time of his parole, the case shows how Britain handles terrorists once the headlines fade: not by ministerial decision, but by process cloaked in darkness.
The case shows how Britain handles terrorists once the headlines fade: not by ministerial decision, but by process cloaked in darkness.
On April 17, 1986, El Al security staff at Heathrow stopped Ann-Marie Murphy, an Irish chambermaid six months pregnant who believed she was flying to Tel Aviv to marry Hindawi. Her bag had passed the airport’s X-ray check. An El Al officer, uneasy about its weight, opened it again and found about three pounds of Semtex behind a false panel, wired to a calculator-detonator timed to go off roughly five hours into the flight. Hindawi had packed the bag himself and fitted the battery in the taxi to the airport, Murphy told the trial.
The High Court described Hindawi as acting as an agent of the Syrian government, and on October 24, 1986, the day he was sentenced, Britain severed diplomatic relations with Syria. Roy Amlot KC, who prosecuted him, told me, “I prosecuted many evil killers, or would-be killers, but he, I think, was the worst.” He called 45 years “the right sentence” that “would be the same today or might be a whole life sentence.”
I have a stake in the story. Days before the bomb was found, I had Sunday lunch at the Hindawi family’s flat in Earl’s Court, where my girlfriend was working as an au pair. Nezar was courteous, soft-spoken, almost shy, and probed me about how to become a journalist. The story has haunted me since.
Ministers of both parties fought to keep him inside. The Court of Appeal had refused leave to appeal against the sentence; the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Lane, called the crime “as foul and as horrible a crime as could possibly be imagined.” Hindawi became eligible for parole in April 2001, but because he was subject to a deportation order, made in November 2000 and never appealed, the Secretary of State rather than the Parole Board reviewed his case and refused release each time. In 2009, the Parole Board recommended release and deportation to Jordan. Justice Secretary Jack Straw rejected the recommendation, and his successor Ken Clarke stood by the refusal.
Then the law changed. From August 2, 2010, the Coroners and Justice Act 2009 made Parole Board decisions binding on the justice secretary. Board panels refused release in the years that followed, and a further challenge reached the High Court in December 2012, which found the Board had failed to consider how the Jordanian authorities would respond if he were returned. The Board approved release and, in 2013, Hindawi left prison without license conditions, the Home Office confirms.
The pattern matters more than the dates. Ministers spent years trying to keep Hindawi in prison and lost, first in court and then by statute. Once the power passed to the Parole Board, things changed. The law worked as Parliament designed it. What it did not require was any explanation to the public.
That is where the silence begins. I asked the Ministry of Justice when Hindawi was released; it told me this was a matter for the Home Office. The Home Office said it does not comment on individual cases. The National Archives, consulting the Crown Prosecution Service, refused my Freedom of Information request for the prosecution file (record DPP 2/9898), citing the safety exemption in section 38(1)(b) and the personal-data exemption in section 40(2), and warning of a risk of reprisals against witnesses. The prosecution files are closed until 2069 and 2071.
The Home Office responded only after I told it that I had taken legal advice—that withholding the prosecution file did not prevent it from stating the year of release or the license conditions. It then confirmed that Hindawi was released in 2013, without conditions. It declined to say whether, or when, he was removed to Jordan under the deportation order. Evidently the department understands the distinction between a file and a fact well.
[The Home Office] declined to say whether, or when, he was removed to Jordan under the deportation order.
Maurice Frankel, director of the Campaign for Freedom of Information, was candid. A request for a man’s whereabouts, he told me, would almost certainly fail under the personal-data exemption, and given the nature of the plot, “it’s possible that he himself might be at risk,” which would engage the safety exemption. He added that the security and intelligence services sit outside Freedom of Information requests and that material derived from them is exempt: “In these areas, secrecy is built into the system.”
The Archives’ fear for witnesses may be real, but it sits oddly beside the two El Al officers who found the bomb, who identified themselves in a 2021 Israeli Channel 13 interview.
Three questions remain unanswered: Who set the timing of Hindawi’s release, why a man convicted of state-sponsored terrorism left prison with no license conditions, and whether and when he left Britain. They go to the heart of how a state manages terrorists it can no longer hold. The public cannot judge the answers when the government will not give them.
