Bridgeview businessman Muhammad Salah was forthcoming and treated well when he underwent a series of interrogations by Israeli agents in 1993, according to testimony at his federal terrorism trial Thursday.
One of Salah’s interrogators, an Israeli agent known only by the alias “Nadav,” testified for a second day Thursday that Salah was given food and drink and a place to rest as he answered questions for weeks about the Palestinian militant group Hamas.
The agent, who testified in a courtroom closed to the public, said Salah provided inside information about Hamas that only a top member of the organization would know.
Among other pieces of information, Salah offered to tell his interrogators the location of a murdered soldier’s body, Nadav said.
In exchange for the information, Salah requested that Israel release female Palestinian prisoners and return $100,000 they seized from him when he was arrested in January 1993.
The negotiation “reinforced the fact that his position [in Hamas] was quite senior because only a senior person would have permission to carry out a negotiation on the location of the body,” Nadav said.
Prosecutors accuse Salah and a co-defendant, Abdelhaleem Ashqar, of suburban Washington, D.C., of providing support to Hamas, a group the U.S. government has designated a terrorist organization.
Salah is charged with transporting hundreds of thousands of dollars from the U.S., where he has been a citizen since the 1970s, to Gaza and the West Bank for use in terrorist attacks. He was convicted in Israel of similar charges in 1993 and spent more than four years in prison there.
Salah’s attorneys say any money provided by Salah was for humanitarian aid. They argue Salah did not voluntarily provide information to Nadav and other agents but was tortured into signing a false confession.
Nadav said that then-Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin ultimately agreed to Salah’s terms in exchange for information about the soldier’s body. Agents and soldiers never found the body, Nadav said.
Nadav also testified that in 1993 Judith Miller, then a New York Times reporter, visited the detention facility where Salah was being held.
Nadav said he asked Salah questions at Miller’s direction. The session led to a front-page story in the New York Times about Hamas support coming from people inside the United States.
She is expected to testify in the trial at a later date.
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rrbush@tribune.com
