Airport Photos of 2 Palestinians Part of Deportation Case

Photographs of two Palestinians picking up air freight packages at Los Angeles International Airport containing foreign magazines supporting a violent Palestine Liberation Organization faction are among the evidence that authorities have assembled in their efforts to deport eight immigrants. A government source also said that investigators have evidence that the immigrants worked with a network of Palestinian groups, including a Los Angeles-based organization, to help underwrite the faction’s activities here and abroad.

This is some of the mosaic of evidence government attorneys are shaping in an effort to deport the immigrants accused of belonging to the Marxist PLO faction, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, The Times has learned.

The government’s investigation of the defendants and the Popular Front, sources said, goes back much further than was first disclosed. The probe began in 1983, when the FBI first began looking into the activities of Khader Musa Hamide, 32, of Glendale, a U.S. resident since 1971, who has been attempting to become a U.S. citizen for four years, these sources said. The government has alleged that Hamide is the leader of the Popular Front in California.

But in no instance will the government allege that the seven Palestinians and a Kenyan were planning--or had committed--violence when they were arrested at gunpoint during a sweep by immigration agents Jan. 26, said several sources close to the case who were interviewed on the condition that they not be named.

In fact, one source said, the government delayed their apprehension for about six weeks after arrest warrants were issued in mid-December because so many immigration agents were on vacation over the Christmas and New Year’s holidays. What’s more, this source said, the government sought to avoid unfavorable publicity over arrests that would have put immigrants behind bars over the Christmas holidays.

Investigators had no reason to believe that the immigrants would commit overt acts of terrorism, one source said. To think so, the source said, is to have “a naive concept” of the case.

“How the hell do they make bombs,” the official asked, “if they don’t get the money?”

All of the defendants have denied any involvement with the Popular Front here or abroad.

They are charged under a deportation section of the 35-year-old Immigration and Nationality Act with advocating “the economic international and governmental doctrines of world communism or the establishment in the United States of a totalitarian dictatorship . . . through any written or printed publications. . . .”

Arab and civil rights groups branded the arrests “Arab-bashing” and a political response to what they call the Reagan Administration’s failed Middle East policies.

So far, a defense team of about a dozen attorneys, including civil rights lawyers Leonard Weinglass, former U.S. attorney general Ramsey Clark plus a group of young California attorneys have worked on behalf of the defendants.

Called Political Case

“We see this as the Reagan Administration’s (test) case to turn the corner against terrorism,” said Jorge Gonzalez, a member of the defendants’ legal team. “This is a very political case.”

“The arrests have absolutely nothing to do with the Arab community,” a government source responded. “They have to do with a group that was in violation of the immigration laws. The case is easily provable.”

Justice Department officials have said that the FBI investigation was unable to turn up evidence for a criminal case against the suspects. In March, 1986, two Immigration and Naturalization investigators joined the probe, which included the planting of an agent in an apartment next door to Hamide’s Glendale unit.

Part of the government’s surveillance was the public photographing of Hamide and another defendant, Aiad Khaled Barakat, 26, of Glendale, at an LAX airline terminal.

Sources said the photos were taken on several occasions when Hamide or Barakat, acting alone, would receive air freight boxes containing about 100 copies each of Al Hadaf, a pro-PFLP (Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine) magazine published in Arabic in Cyprus. The magazines were then distributed through small liquor, video and other commercial outlets and handed out individually, they said.

Defense’s View

According to Dan Stormer, the defense team’s leader, “Khader (Hamide) wasn’t doing anything illegal (when they took his picture). So he didn’t ask why they were taking pictures.”

The magazine shipments were made on a monthly basis to LAX, a defense lawyer said. Investigators said they believe they may have been sent through other ports of entry as well. Copies of the magazine were subsequently subpoenaed by the government.

Other evidence centers on the immigrants allegedly using their connections with local Palestinian fund-raising groups to further Popular Front causes here and abroad.

One of the focuses of the investigation has been the defendants’ alleged involvement with a 30-year-old Palestinian humanitarian organization based in Los Angeles called U.S. Omen, an acronym for United States Organization for Medical and Educational Needs. Originally formed by Arab American doctors to help West Bank Palestinian refugees, its supporters say it branched out to aid needy causes worldwide.

No one in the government suggested to The Times that U.S. Omen was anything but a humanitarian organization. But investigators are understood to believe that U.S. Omen officials were unaware that some of the defendants were using its name to raise funds for Popular Front activities.

On U.S. Omen’s board of directors is “Khader Musa,” which a government source said is another name for Khader Musa Hamide. Under advice of counsel, Hamide won’t discuss the government’s accusations.

Limited Scope Told

According to U.S. Omen officials, the organization never distributed more than $50,000 in any one year, and in 1986 handed out about $20,000 worth of educational, medical, health and community grants earmarked for various Middle East groups, including West Bank Palestinian refugees.

Asked to comment on the government’s view of how the defendants may have used the organization, Dr. Sabri Elfarra of Los Angeles, one of U.S. Omen’s founders, said that if federal investigators were probing the flow of U.S. Omen funds, “they’re a bunch of fools. It is 110% humanitarian. There’s nothing political. I can assure you it was never used for any other means.”

Intelligence information also placed Hamide at the San Diego Convention and Performing Arts Center in February, 1986, for a fund-raising and cultural meeting allegedly designed to benefit Popular Front interests.

Investigators have alleged that several Popular Front operatives were among the approximately 400 people present at the event sponsored by another Palestinian group. A similar meeting at the San Diego Center scheduled for last month was canceled, a spokesman for the center said.

Defense leader Stormer, commenting on reports of the government’s surveillance of his clients, declared: “Grass-roots surveillance is the most heinous form of invasion of privacy that any government can participate in. It has to drag into its broad net all manner of innocent people.”