Suit over teen's death in Israel tests antiterror laws

CHICAGO -- Top leaders of Muslim-American organizations are being deposed as witnesses in a federal lawsuit filed on behalf of a Brooklyn-born teenager who was gunned down near Jerusalem eight years ago.

David Boim was sitting at a bus stop when members of the group Hamas opened fire on May 13, 1996. Boim was killed and a classmate was injured.

Nathan Lewin, a Washington attorney, filed a $600 million civil complaint on behalf of David's parents, Joyce and Stanley Boim, in May 2000. It accuses several US-based Islamic organizations, alleged Hamas supporters, and Muhammad Salah, a part-time teacher and car salesman living in a suburb south of Chicago, of being "part of an ongoing conspiracy to promote Hamas and to raise funds in the United States for its terrorist operations."

In recent weeks, depositions have been wrapping up, but it's still not clear if the case will go to trial. Joyce Boim's deposition took place Tuesday at the Chicago office of Rick Hoffman, one of the family's lawyers; he would only describe the proceedings as "very difficult for her."

Defense lawyers say the Boims' testimony fails to show the organizations somehow contributed to their son's death. "We don't think they have enough evidence to warrant a trial in this case," says John Beal, an attorney for the Quranic Literacy Institute. "They have never had any personal knowledge of the defendant organizations. Their lawyers developed the information."

The Boims' suit is based on largely untested federal antiterrorism laws enacted in the early 1990s. While such laws can be empowering to plaintiffs, exactly who can be held responsible remains ambiguous.

Lawyers representing thousands of plaintiffs in a lawsuit against alleged supporters of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks are watching the Boim case closely. Some of those plaintiffs have already received payments from the 9/11 Victim Compensation Fund, but the suit seeks to show that members of the Saudi royal family, among others, are liable for supporting the illegal activity that led to the crime.

In the Boim case, Hoffman says they have taken depositions from a dozen US-based Muslim leaders, including at least four from the Quranic Literacy Institute. Also deposed was Shukri Abu-Baker, the president of the Texas-based Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development. Baker went into detail about Holy Land's "emergency relief" programs for Turkish earthquake victims, and work in the war-torn regions of Chechnya, Kosovo, Lebanon, the West Bank, and Gaza during his initial deposition last year.

Baker also was asked about a $210,000 contribution from Mousa Abu Marzook to the foundation in 1992. A onetime director at the Virginia-based United Association for Studies and Research (both he and that organization are also named in the Boims' suit), Marzook was later declared a Hamas operative, was deported from the United States in 1997, and is now said to be living in Syria.

On April 5, Hoffman filed another motion to subpoena Baker, specifically to question him about a 1993 meeting of alleged Hamas leaders in Philadelphia.

At the time, Hamas had not been designated a terrorist organization, but the FBI alleged in a Nov. 5, 2001, memo from counter-terrorism director Dale Watson that, "The overall goal of the meeting was to develop a strategy to defeat the Israeli/Palestinian peace accord, and to continue to improve their fund-raising and political activities in the United States."

Lawyers for Holy Land contend the meeting did not concern politics, only how to provide charitable assistance to Palestinians and others.

After the Sept. 11 attacks, Holy Land's offices in the United States were shut and its assets frozen.

The Boims' lawyers have since attached that FBI memo to their suit.

"Certainly that's something that would be of interest to us," Hoffman said of the memo. "A lot of people are going around trying to sue Saudis or Hamas. This is a tool to try and address what's going on in this country. We're trying to go after the people in this country who are providing support to terrorist organizations."

After Baker's second deposition, discovery could wrap up over the summer. "We're going to ask about a trial date, but none's been set yet," Hoffman said.

Lawyers for the organizations say they have been denied due process. "I view this as a slap suit. They're trying to put organizations out of business," said Jim Fennerty, an attorney for the Islamic Association for Palestine, an advocacy group based in Illinois.

John Boyd, who represents the Holy Land Foundation, says his clients want to show the organization has never provided funds to Hamas, starting with documentation to show that orphans supported by the charity are not the children of suicide bombers.

"They just want the opportunity to prove that they're innocent of this," Boyd says. "It would be very simple to prove. But so far the courts have said drop dead. They have refused to provide the Holy Land Foundation any sort of hearing."

Muslim community members say that with no official charges against the organizations, the Boims' suit has only served as a fishing expedition and disrupted what were long considered legitimate distributors of the charitable donations mandated by Islam.

Lewin is handling the Boims' case pro bono. In a telephone interview, he said to refer to his March 25, 1999, testimony before the Senate Appropriations Committee's Subcommittee on Foreign Operations, in which he said the Justice Department's "refusal" to extradite Boim's killers to the United States was "unconscionable."

Lewin cited letters from Justice officials who said the department lacked "sufficient evidence on which to base an indictment" of Boim's two killers. One of the assailants was found guilty of "participation in murder" by a Palestinian court and sentenced to hard labor, but disappeared when he was granted leave for a religious holiday. The other man was apparently freed, then killed himself in a suicide bombing the year after Boim's murder.

In a ruling hailed by Lewin in June 2002, the federal appeals court in Chicago ruled the Boims could proceed with discovery, but made it incumbent on them to prove that the defendants knew about Hamas's illegal activity, "desired to help that activity, and engaged in some act of helping."

Also central to the Boims' complaint is a 1998 federal civil-forfeiture case. It seized $1.4 million in assets from Salah and the Quranic Literacy Institute, which was formed in November 1990 by influential Arab businessmen and an imam in Illinois, with a stated mission to translate sacred Islamic texts. Salah was employed by the institute as a computer analyst.

The Boims' "Exhibit A" is an affidavit from Chicago FBI agent Robert Wright, which details how Salah allegedly used his status as an institute employee in 1992 to funnel money from Saudi Arabian national Yasin Qadi and others to Hamas.

The United States declared Qadi a Specially Designated Global Terrorist and froze his assets in October 2001. He was later alleged to have funded the Ptech firm in Quincy, Mass.

Court documents show the government was nearing a settlement with the institute and Salah's attorneys in the summer of 2001. "We were discussing terms for a potential resolution," said Mary Rowland, an attorney for Salah. "Then I was told by representatives of the government that any resolution of that would be put on hold--in light of Sept. 11, the government said they weren't willing to negotiate."