The Sbarro bomber’s American saga: Ahlam Tamimi escaped Israel - US failed to bring her to justice

While the United States is celebrating its 250th anniversary of independence, the parents of a teenager with American citizenship, murdered 25 years ago in an atrocity whose perpetrator, Ahlam Tamimi, was released from prison in 2011 by the Israeli government in the Schalit deal, have since then been pleading with the US authorities to follow their own laws and legal decisions to bring the murderer to justice in an American court.

“Justice,” a word repeated three times in America’s Declaration of Independence. The third time is regarding the Americans’ “British brethren” as having been “deaf to the voice of justice...”

But have the tables turned? Is it the US that has become deaf to the voice of justice demanded by Frimet and Arnold Roth, the parents of Malka Chana – Malki – a justice they have been pursuing for 15 years?

Their fervent dedication and resolve have been up against powerful people in Israel, Jordan, and the US. It is a story of obfuscation and pain, with only an occasional glimmer of hope and light.

Arnold Roth: “Because Americans had been murdered at Sbarro, we hoped that a rarely invoked federal law, Section 2332a of Title 18 of the United States Code, might apply to get Tamimi back behind bars in the US.”

The other American citizen murdered in Sbarro was Shoshana Yehudit Greenbaum, 31, a teacher originally from LA and living in Passaic, New Jersey. An only child, she had arrived in Israel with her husband for six weeks of graduate studies and was pregnant with their first child at the time of her death.

Chana Tova Chaya Nachenberg, of Modi’in, also an American, was 31 at the time of the attack. Severely wounded, she was in a coma for almost 22 years and succumbed to her wounds on June 1, 2023. Therefore, earlier letters and articles refer to only two American citizens who were murdered in the attack.

Section 2332a is a federal criminal statute titled “Use of weapons of mass destruction,” including “against a US national outside the United States.” The weapons can include “bombs, grenades, certain rockets, certain missiles, mines, similar devices... and if death results, shall be punished by death or imprisoned for any term of years or for life.”

“From our research,” said Roth, “we learned that Jordan and the US entered into an extradition treaty in 1995 and that it was active; fugitives had been extradited.”

In March 2012, news emerged from the Arab media that Tamimi was about to start hosting a TV show of her own. This was the trigger that got Roth to engage with the American authorities. A New York lawyer who had become a trusted adviser arranged for them (Roth and the lawyer) to travel together to Washington to meet with senior figures in the Department of Justice (DOJ) and the FBI.

Roth: “We met behind closed doors. There was an emotional feel to the room. I urged them in the name of justice and decency to apply Section 2332a and get Tamimi brought to Washington for trial. I then screened a video that Frimet had recorded the night before on my cellphone. My sense was that they were touched.”

The meeting ran for about 90 minutes. By the end, Roth said, he received assurances that something was going to be done. “But we’re not going to be able to tell you anything,” he was told, “until we can tell you everything.”

Regarding her role, Frimet Roth added, “Traveling overseas is hard for me because I am the principal carer of our youngest child, who is now 31. She lives with us at home, and her profound disabilities mean I have to do everything for her 24/7. For me, travel is not an option.”

The Roths heard nothing further from the DOJ for several years. In early 2016, Roth was invited to Congress to testify before Ron DeSantis’s House Oversight Committee on National Security.

“What none of us in the chamber realized was that a criminal complaint had been issued against Tamimi in the District Court of the District of Columbia 15 months after our 2012 meeting with the DOJ leadership.”

The fact that in 2013 the Department of Justice filed charges against Tamimi in federal court is confirmed by the DOJ Archives.

But then, Arnold Roth said, “It promptly sealed them for the following four years.”

Frimet confirmed, “Our request was honored, but years went by before we learned that.”

In March 2017, weeks into the first Trump presidency, the US government, Roth surmised, concluded that keeping the charges secret was no longer helping its efforts to obtain Tamimi’s custody. The Justice Department unsealed the charges.

When making the charges public in a media presentation, acting assistant attorney-general Mary McCord described Tamimi as “an unrepentant terrorist,” and the FBI simultaneously placed her on its Most Wanted Terrorists list.

How did the Roths learn about the unsealing of the charges?

Arnold: “Five years had passed since I brought my challenge to the Department of Justice, and they seemed ready and willing to take it on. But nothing had happened other than Tamimi’s weekly TV shows that were seen everywhere in the world. She was the embodiment of Islamist pride in jihad.

“Then, in March 2017, there was a phone call from Washington. Frimet and I were asked to meet a delegation a few days later here in Jerusalem. No details, no headline, no sense of what was on the agenda.

“We arrive and see the family of the other murdered American woman, people with whom we had become friends. Everyone else in the room was from Washington – a delegation made up of seven or eight prosecutors and investigators.

“We were somewhere between elated and puzzled by what we heard next. Elated because they said, ‘Three hours from now, there’s going to be a press conference, and we’re announcing that Tamimi has been charged. Sorry, we couldn’t tell you, but they [the charges] were issued four years ago.’ We learned she was being immediately named to the FBI Most Wanted Terrorists list.

“Heading home, we began puzzling over things that were not said. For instance, they’re charging her and making her an FBI Most Wanted, but no reward was mentioned. Was that normal? At home, I checked the FBI website and saw that all the Most Wanted Terrorists had serious rewards attached to their names and mugshots. Not Tamimi.

“They confirmed that Jordan has an active extradition treaty with the US, and we wondered why no actual extradition to Washington had come up, and we wondered why we aren’t hearing that she’s being extradited to Washington tomorrow afternoon on the 4:30 p.m. flight out of Amman?”

He continued, “Six days after the DOJ announcement of the Tamimi charges, we saw reports that Jordan’s highest court had handed down a ruling in a hearing we had not known about – a determination that Jordan’s treaty with the United States, made in 1995 between [US president Bill] Clinton and King Hussein, is invalid. That Tamimi cannot be extradited. End of case, and the decision is not appealable.

“What gradually became clear but [was] unreported by any news channel,” said Roth, “was that the so-called invalidity was a Jordanian failure. Jordanian law required the treaty to be ratified by the parliament, and it wasn’t. They had failed to do it.

“But the defect, if that’s what it was, could be cured by Jordan – only by Jordan. But Jordan didn’t fix it and will not fix it, because, as we came to understand, it’s not a defect; it’s a fig leaf, a small and shabby one. But it’s done the job for the past nine years. I’m not aware of anyone publicly calling Jordan to account for its sleight of hand.”

On the official site Congress.gov, the following appears: “The United States requested Tamimi’s extradition in 2017, but Jordan’s Court of Cassation ruled that the extradition treaty was invalid.”

In January 2018, the State Department’s Rewards for Justice program announced a reward of up to $5 million for information leading to Tamimi’s arrest or conviction. This also appears on Rewards for Justice, a US government site. Roth said the award was announced, “after a lot of frustrated pushing on our part.”

In November 2019, the State Department said that “the United States regards the extradition treaty as valid.” More than two and a half years after Jordan said it was invalid? The wheels of justice spin slowly.

I asked Arnold Roth whether Secretary of State Marco Rubio or any of his predecessors had responded to his requests to press for Jordanian compliance with the treaty.

Roth: “For the next few years, no senior official from the State Department, in any administration, ever responded to us on any aspect of this.”

Roth said, “The situation gets darker. It’s 2019, and in one of the very rare conversations I had with a junior desk officer in the State Department some weeks after the invalidity was announced, I learned that Jordan actually did ratify the treaty, and ‘we have the documents.’

“But getting a hold of that important document took months of filing applications under FOIA, the Freedom of Information Act. And when that failed, we eventually sued the government in 2020.”

Among the documents delivered to the Roths’ lawyers in stages, starting in early 2021, was a letter that had been signed by the late King Hussein in 1995, addressing the US government (see graphic).

I asked about the other documents. Roth explained, “Scores of documents, almost all massively redacted... all dealing with aspects of the treaty process.”

King Hussein’s letter blew the lid off Jordan’s Court of Cassation ruling invalidating the extradition treaty, a ruling that directly contradicts the clear intention of King Hussein, who had taken the treaty so seriously that he added this letter to it.

Roth explained: “The letter was part of the process of each of the two countries certifying to the other that their own legal and constitutional treaty requirements had been met.”

Officially translated by the US State Department, it says, “With the help of God and His guidance, we, Hussein I, having reviewed the Extradition Traety [sic], signed in Washington on March 28, 1995, between the Government of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, and the Government of the United States of America, do hereby declare our agreement to and ratification of that Traety in whole and in part. We further pledge to carry out its provisions and abide by its Articles, and we, God willing, shall not allow its violation.”

Thanks to the Roths’ FOIA submission and subsequent suing of the US government, this letter was made public.

“The Jordanian court that had declared the treaty void and unenforceable back in 2017 said nothing about any letter like this. Didn’t even hint at its existence,” Roth said. “But if we hoped revealing a formal 1995 letter from the revered King Hussein would change how Jordan’s 2017 violation of the treaty looked to the media, to Congress, to the Jordanians, we were disappointed.”

He said that starting just four months after Tamimi returned in 2011 to her homeland, Jordan, her TV show "began being beamed throughout the Arabic-speaking world via an Islamist satellite TV network, glorifying Islamist terrorism. It continued being produced and disseminated weekly from a studio in Jordan’s capital for the next four years.

“This is significant since Jordan has a notably unfree media. Nothing goes to air in Jordan unless it gets green-lighted by the Royal Hashemite Court.”

Significantly, Abdullah II became the king of Jordan on February 7, 1999, the day his father, King Hussein, who had signed both the treaty and the additional treaty letter in 1995, died. Abdullah II would have been well aware of Tamimi’s broadcasts.

The Roths, distraught, took their battle to the media. King Abdullah II was scheduled to meet then-president Joe Biden on July 18, 2021.

In a column hosted on Bari Weiss’s Substack on July 2, 2021, Arnold wrote, “President Biden, we beg you: press [Abdullah II] to live up to Jordan’s promise by extraditing Ahlam Tamimi. Let her stand trial for murdering innocent Americans – one of them, my child.”

In the same column, regarding the Most Wanted Terrorists list, he wrote: “The other fugitives on this list are, not surprisingly, all in hiding. But the investigators and prosecutors at the DOJ and the FBI know exactly where Tamimi lives.”

They wrote of Tamimi, “For five years in Jordan, she hosted a Hamas-produced terror-inciting television show called Breezes of the Free. She appeared frequently at public events and on Jordanian television. Students of the Arab world’s premier graduate school for journalists named her their ‘success model.’ Last month a prominent pan-Arab news site made her a weekly columnist.”

Roth said there was no response from the Biden administration.

When asked if there had been any direct contact with the Trump administration, Roth said they had been in contact with US Ambassador Mike Huckabee since May 2025.

“One of my goals as ambassador is seeing justice done. Malki would be 40 years old this year.”

Roth said he and Frimet have stayed in touch with a small handful of US officials in the past year and hope this will lead to something concrete. He declined to be more specific.

Roth: “We lost our child, and so many other families experienced the same painful and horrifying thing, a quarter of a century ago. The woman who had the central role in this carnage is... a recognizable icon across the Arab and the Islamic worlds, and she’s smart and capable enough to use that celebrity to keep pushing a frightening message.

“I don’t care to protect the guilty or overlook the failures. As a cause that should have united people across political, religious, and national divisions, getting Tamimi to US justice has helped some of us understand that leadership is vastly overrated, and we have serious problems in our midst. I am among those who have seen the light.

“I can translate that into what I think it says about America’s political culture today. There are lessons to be internalized about how the fight to defeat terror is nowhere near as effective as we need it to be.

“But for me,” he stressed, “the central message is a Jewish one. I think of our brothers and sisters in America’s Jewish communities who take pride in the values we cherish in common, and in our history of overcoming evil, as being the people who need to know this.”

“There are bright spots, of course,” Roth said, calling Huckabee’s “clear-eyed comments and gracious support” exemplary. In fact, in an X post on Sunday, Huckabee shared a link to the DOJ page offering up to $5 million for information assisting in Tamimi’s capture.

Ambassador Rabbi Yehuda Kaploun, the US special envoy on antisemitism, also posted the link.

Did the US go after any other terrorists who took American lives in Israel?

Arnold: “Tamimi was the first case in which a US criminal provision was applied to a murder by terrorists outside the US. But not the only one.

“Another case, undertaken by the DOJ around the same time as the Tamimi one, concerns the murder of Kristine Luken, an American Christian tourist murdered in an especially barbaric way by Arabs in the forested hills outside Jerusalem. Her tour guide, my friend Tal Hartuv [who changed her name from Kay Wilson], was shockingly injured but survived.

“The difference between the two instances is that Kristine Luken’s killers were already serving time in an Israeli prison when those charges were issued, while Malki’s killer was already obscenely free. Other American criminal prosecutions of Arab terrorists may be underway now via the same law, but I don’t know about them.”

Arnold: “One of the two was, yes, in the October 2025 transaction in which thousands of Arab prisoners walked free so that Hamas would hand over the remaining hostages and hostage bodies from Gaza.

“Terrorists being freed in extortionate deals are always a catastrophe. Doing such deal is wrong. That it falls to the families of victims to fight for justice to be done is wronger still.”

Arnold: “Pressing the US to act has been a strange experience.

“No one ever says we’re wrong to expect American justice to be done. No one speaks in Tamimi’s defense, obviously. No one says it’s wrong to press Jordan to live up to its treaty obligation. No one argues with us that this has all gone very badly since the Justice Department decided to get Tamimi into a Washington courthouse.

“But the reality – thwarted justice until today – speaks louder than those many words.

“Politics is politics, and people wielding power rarely own up to doing the wrong thing. So when I say fighting for justice has gotten us treated badly, and when I point out that the actions of those in government contradict the values they profess, pushback is inevitable.

“‘What about those declarations we made?’ I imagine them saying. ‘Didn’t we call for justice? Didn’t we say we wouldn’t stop until it was achieved?’

“So, yes, when the US, which for us has usually meant the State Department, issued statements, these included some of the right words – but in total they have been empty, meaningless mantras.

“I don’t mean to sound partisan in the US political sense here. The shallow statements and the failure to act have been true of both Republicans and Democrats.”

(It’s worth noting that Israel has its own multi-partisan issues. The 1993 signing of the Oslo Accords, for example, under a Labor government, brought on an extreme increase in terror that persisted in both Labor and Likud majority governments. The Sbarro attack happened under Likud PM Ariel Sharon.)

Roth preferred not to name individuals, but when pressed, consented to talk in detail about one difficult interaction that lasted for months.

Roth: “Both by direct mail and via news platforms and social media, we have addressed ourselves to people at the level of president on down for years. This almost never produces a reaction, but in 2022 it did.

“A fax turned up in our home towards the end of 2022, addressed personally to us but passed along via the US Embassy in Jerusalem a month after the date it was faxed.

“It was signed by Victoria J. Nuland, undersecretary of state for political affairs and a powerful figure in the State Department. But we were startled by how she was writing in the names of president Biden, secretary of state Antony Blinken, and national security advisor Jake Sullivan.”

And then a clear statement of intent: Bringing Tamimi to US justice “is a foremost priority for the United States. We will stay in contact with you regarding our ongoing efforts to ensure Tamimi is held accountable for her despicable crimes.”

The message seemed clear and unambiguous. “Foremost priority” must have meant something. And while staying in touch was the opposite of what the Roths had experienced, here was a commitment that the three most important people in the saga – Biden, Blinken, and Sullivan – were going to keep on doing it.

The Roths responded with a letter to Nuland; it got no reply. Then another. And eventually 11 letters, they say, all sent to Nuland in the five months after her fax. And not a single response, then or ever. Also, no one stayed in touch. Nuland left the State Department in March 2024, and the Roths knew to stop bothering her, Arnold said.

The Taylor Force Act, which demands stopping economic aid to the Palestinian Authority until it ends payments to those who commit acts of terrorism and to the families of dead attackers, was signed into law in the US only in 2018.

Taylor Force, a former US Army officer and veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan, during a school study-abroad trip, was stabbed and killed by a Palestinian terrorist in Jaffa in 2016.

He was not the first American citizen killed by Palestinians terrorists in Israel, but he was a non-Jewish American.

According to Hirsch, in 2025, NIS 395,970,000 was awarded to imprisoned and released terrorists.

According to Palestinian Media Watch, as reported in The Jerusalem Post on January 28, 2026, as of that date, Tamimi “has received around NIS 1,158,000 in pay-for-slay payments since she was first incarcerated.”

Jordan has extradited or surrendered three terrorists to the United States in the past. None of those had been guilty of murdering Israeli Jews.

Eyad Ismoil (aka Iyad Isama’il Al-Najim), a Jordanian citizen charged with being part of the plot to destroy the World Trade Center in 1993, fled back to Jordan, was captured by Jordanian police in August 1995, and then extradited to the US. He was convicted in November 1997 and sentenced in April 1998 to 240 years' imprisonment in a maximum-security penitentiary. According to a DOJ bulletin published on October 1, 1995, this was an official extradition.

Mohammad Zaki Amawi had both US and Jordanian citizenship. According to a US Court of Appeals document, “On February 19, 2006, FBI agents flew to Jordan and arrested Amawi.” He was flown to the US and convicted in 2008.

He was one of three men who stood trial in Ohio, sentenced to prison terms “for conspiring to commit terrorist acts against Americans overseas, including US military personnel in Iraq, and other terrorism-related violations.”

In Amawi’s case, the sentence given was “20 years of incarceration followed by life on supervised release.”

Nader Saadeh of Rutherford, New Jersey, who had dual US-Jordanian citizenship, was apprehended on arrival in Amman and jailed there for three months before authorities sent him to America in August 2015 to the FBI.

In 2018, he was sentenced to 10 years in prison, to be followed by a lifetime of supervised release, for conspiring to provide material support to ISIS.

On April 30, 2020, Greg Steube, a Republican member of the House of Representatives from Florida, whose jobs in Congress included judiciary oversight and veterans’ affairs, sent a letter to Dina Kawar, ambassador of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, serving in Washington.

The letter, more than two pages long, was signed by Steube and six other Republican congressmen.

Steube had been a captain in the US Army and an army judge advocate in the General’s Corps; he served in Iraq.

Three of the other six signees had also served in the US military. Especially notable was Brian Mast of Florida, who had been a combat engineer in the US Army, lost both legs while serving in Afghanistan, and was awarded the Bronze Star and Purple Heart. Today, he is chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee.

In the letter, Steube revisited the details of Tamimi’s atrocity and the outrageous fact that she is treated as a celebrity in Jordan and continues to use her exalted platforms to promote terror.

And then he wrote:

“US Federal charges were first brought against Tamimi in mid-2013. The US then delivered a formal extradition request under the treaty between our two countries that had been signed in Washington on March 28, 1995, and that entered into force on July 29, 1995. The Hashemite Kingdom refused. It continues to refuse to do so until today. This is a matter of grave and growing concern to the Congress and to all Americans. The American view concerning the treaty is that it is certainly valid. It continues to be listed in the US government’s authoritative Treaties in Force document.

“On March 14, 2017, Justice Department officials in Washington, DC, officially announced US Federal terrorism charges against Tamimi and added her the same day to the FBI’s Most Wanted Terrorists list. There is a $5 million State Department reward for her capture and conviction.”

Steube, as far as is known, never received an official response to his letter.

On April 14, 2022, a bill was introduced in the House of Representatives by Steube: “To limit assistance to Jordan until the Government of Jordan recognizes the validity of the 1995 extradition treaty between the two countries, and for other purposes.”

Apparently, it stayed in committee and never became law.

The EMET (Endowment for Middle East Truth) organization, reportedly behind the Steube effort, after recapping the fact that the US asked for Tamimi’s extradition and the Jordanian government refused, writes:

“The Jordanian government is the third-largest recipient of US foreign aid and receives $1.275 billion annually.

“In December of 2019, the US government passed Public Law 116-94, the most recent Appropriations Bill which states, in regard to foreign appropriations, ‘None of these funds, provided by this Act may be used to provide assistance to the central government of a country which has notified the Department of State of its refusal to extradite to the United States any individual indicted for a criminal offense for which the maximum penalty is life imprisonment without the possibility of parole, or for killing a law enforcement officer.’”

EMET founder and president Sarah Stern wrote: “[A]s long as the United States turns a blind eye to the murderers of American citizens, we [the US] will be reinforcing their resolve against the United States.”

Arnold Roth said, “I understand people who see us as bitter and angry. But we’re constructive and optimistic even when facing hard developments. If we’re harsh, it’s because we see things around us that need to be condemned. And also changed.

“There’s a wonderful charity that exists today in Malki’s memory – the Malki Foundation – that achieves small victories against tough realities. It’s there because we lost our sweet daughter. It won’t bring her back, but the good it achieves helps us stay focused on the good in our lives.”

He added contemplatively, “Several influential people from Israel’s think tanks have told me, more or less in patronizing words, over the years that there’s a fundamental fact we need to get into our heads. ‘The longest border Israel has is our eastern border with Jordan. All along that border, armed Jordanian forces stand on guard. And their guns? Those are pointed at their own people, and so we have peace. Can we get a better situation than that?’

“I try to point out that Jordan is near the top of the table of antisemitic sentiment, even by Middle East standards. And what has Jordan’s government done to address that? Has it fixed the schoolbooks with their hateful messaging about Israel? Have they prepared their people for a future of peaceful relations with Jews and Israelis?

“Right now, Israel is spending $1.5b. to create a much more fortified fence along the border with Jordan.”

“Is that because we have a peaceful border?

“And even if the answer is yes, should we be allowing them to turn Tamimi into an icon of hateful bigotry, an inspiration to more terror? Is there a case for exempting Jordan from accountability for holding on to a fugitive murderer of Americans? For trampling a cornerstone treaty with its far-and-away most important ally, the United States?

“That this woman remains a toxic celebrity is the dangerous outcome of a long line of bad decisions.”

At the time of this writing, there are no answers to Roth’s questions.