New interest in decades old killing of Palestinian activist

The decades-old assassination of a Palestinian activist in Orange County has generated new interest in Washington, D.C. after Sen. Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.), chair of the Judiciary Committee and Senate Majority Whip, requested an update from the FBI in December. 

On Oct. 11, 1985, Alexander Michel Odeh, then the West Coast regional director for the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, opened the door to the organization’s Santa Ana office, which detonated a rigged pipe bomb. The 41-year-old was alive when first responders arrived but died two hours after being transported to a hospital.

According to the TimesOC, then-FBI spokesman Leon Bonner said the Jewish Defense League, an extremist group founded in 1968 by the late Rabbi Meir Kahane, was responsible for the crime.

The Los Angeles Times reported in October 2021 that then-Santa Ana Police Officer Hugh Mooney, who was managing the crime scene, said a helicopter landed at the scene and four me  disembarked. Mooney said two were Los Angeles Police Department Joint Terrorism Task Force members and two were FBI agents. “They told us that they had been tracking a couple of guys from New York and Los Angeles, and they lost them at LAX.” 

An anonymous person calling themselves a police official gave the Village Voice three names, the Times said: Andy Green, Robert Manning and Keith Fuchs. All three allegedly belonged to the Jewish Defense League.

Manning was extradited from Israel in 1993 and was convicted of a mail-bomb murder that killed a Manhattan Beach secretary in 1980. He’s considered a person of interest in the Odeh bombing and currently is serving a life sentence at the Federal Correction Institution in Phoenix.

Fuchs and Green have been rumored to live in an Israeli settlement near Hebron, a city in the West Bank.

The case remains open and unsolved.