JNS
The father of Malki Roth, a victim of the 2001 Sbarro pizzeria suicide bombing in Jerusalem, says the logic of protecting Jordan’s monarchical head of state kept “everybody off the king’s tail.”
The pattern has been consistent for Arnold and Frimet Roth: a seeming breakthrough, followed by a struggle to build momentum, as the couple seeks the extradition of their 15-year-old daughter’s killer.
Malki Roth was among the three American citizens murdered in a suicide bombing of a Sbarro pizzeria in Jerusalem on Aug. 9, 2001, which killed 16 people in all.
Ahlam Tamimi, a Jordanian national, assisted in carrying out the terror attack and has boasted of her role in the devastation it wrought in media appearances following her release from an Israeli prison in 2011 as part of an exchange for Gilad Shalit, an Israeli soldier who was held captive by Hamas in Gaza from June 2006 to October 2011.
Tamimi was secretly charged by the U.S. Justice Department for conspiring to use a weapon of mass destruction against American nationals outside the United States, resulting in deaths. The criminal complaint was unsealed in 2017.
Tamimi was added to the FBI’s Most Wanted Terrorists list, with a $5 million reward for her arrest offered by the U.S. State Department’s Rewards for Justice program, even though she is not in hiding and her home address is known to authorities.
Jordan has refused to comply with a 1995 U.S.-Jordan extradition treaty signed by leaders of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, then led by King Hussein, arguing that its Jordanian parliament never ratified it.
A State Department document, obtained by the Roths and viewed by JNS, shows Hussein, on behalf of Jordan, “hereby declare our agreement to and ratification of” the extradition treaty “in whole or in part” and “further pledge to carry out its provisions” and “not allow its violation.”
The treaty is listed in the 2025 version of the State Department’s Treaties in Force.
In July, Jeanine Pirro, U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, held a video conference with the Roths to discuss Tamimi’s extradition.
While Pirro pledged that the case remained a Justice Department priority and she would do what she could to advance it, Arnold Roth said that she noted that it wasn’t entirely up to her, as other departments of the U.S. government were also involved.
Days later, JNS asked what was stopping U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio from demanding Tamimi’s extradition. The State Department issued a written response that “the United States has continually emphasized to the government of Jordan the importance of holding [Tamimi] accountable in a U.S. court.”
The department added that “the United States continues to impress upon the government of Jordan that Tamimi is a brutal murderer, who should be brought to justice.”
JNS again pressed the State Department later that week in a press briefing about how the department’s ineffective response aligned with the administration’s America First foreign policy mantra. Tommy Pigott, State Department principal deputy spokesman, replied that U.S. President Donald Trump and Rubio have “made clear through their actions that America is coming first.”
“We’ve seen that with the Americans that have been brought home. We see that with the pursuit of peace around the region,” he said,
“They are actions,” Pigott said. “Those are north stars that we fulfill every single day to the best of our ability, making sure we’re advancing the interests of the American people in absolutely every single way that we can.”
Still, Pigott reiterated that the administration “continues to impress upon the government of Jordan that Tamimi is a brutal murderer who should be brought to justice.”
That statement is a slight variation on one that’s been issued by the State Department at various times for several years.
Since then, there has been no apparent movement by the government on the matter.
“The Justice Department has always, from 2017 when they sent a delegation of senior people here to Jerusalem to sit with us, made plain to us that there are obstacles inside the United States government, with heavy hints that it was the State Department in particular,” Arnold Roth, Malki’s father, told JNS.
He said that while Justice Department investigators have consistently provided reassurances that the case remains active and a priority, “Justice are the only ones who’ve done anything at all.”
The conventional thinking on the topic has been that the United States and Jordan maintain a critical and delicate security relationship, and that Tamimi’s extradition would risk angering the Jordanian street to the point that it could present a threat to Abdullah’s rule.
“It’s some cleverly calculated ruse by the Jordanians, by the royal Hashemite court, to present the king as fragile,” Roth said. “He might be overturned at any minute. We’ve been hearing that since 2017. I don’t say it’s untrue. I am saying that it’s contrived, and it certainly had the effect on this issue to keep everybody off the king’s tail.”
‘Punish somebody twice for the same crime’
Jonathan Schanzer, executive director at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and a former government counterterrorism analyst, told JNS that the State Department “is trying to thread a needle here.”
They understand the Jordanian and Israeli perspectives, he said, “and they continue to try to figure out how to work between the two, and I don’t think it’s particularly easy to thread that needle.”
But, Schanzer said, that’s only part of the equation.
“Tamimi was jailed, and then released, and then sent back to Jordan with the idea that this was ‘case closed,’” Schanzer told JNS. “What’s coming up now is this question of whether you can punish somebody twice for the same crime.”
Schanzer said his impression from multiple U.S. administrations is that Tamimi’s exile to Jordan “was considered to be the end of the punitive phase for her, thereby negating any requests for additional action taken.”
From that standpoint, “the Jordanians are basically saying they’ve already done their part, abiding by international law,” he said.
The State Department has never publicly adopted this line of reasoning.
While he agreed in principle that the concept of double jeopardy doesn’t apply when someone is wanted by multiple jurisdictions, Schanzer said that “in terms of the way that the State Department sort of respects other people’s systems, that this appears to be the driving factor.”
‘Want to push the issue’
David Schenker, who served as assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs in the first Trump administration, told JNS that his view on the situation is “unpopular.”
He said that Israel committed “the original sin” due to its “rendering of a killer of Americans to a country with a questionable extradition treaty to get out their own prisoner.”
Nevertheless, a JNS source said there were figures in the first Trump administration who placed Tamimi’s extradition high on their list of priorities. That included Kash Patel, who currently serves as the FBI director.
Patel was principal deputy director of national intelligence and chief of staff to the defense secretary during the first Trump White House. (JNS sought comment from the FBI.)
The source said that some of the same other figures who have returned to the administration “want to push the issue,” even though “it’s more difficult now after two years-plus of Gaza.”
“This is a president that is known to throw curveballs at the system,” Schanzer told JNS. “If the president wanted to make this something of a priority, he could, but as of right now, I see Marco Rubio sort of falling in with the perspective or the legal reasoning of his predecessors.”
Roth said that through the federal court system, he is pursuing what he calls the unlawful redaction of “certainly dozens and maybe hundreds of pages” of State Department documents that were turned over as a result of Freedom of Information Act requests for communications related to the Tamimi issue.
“Everything was redacted, except for the page number and the date, and maybe the name of some official who was the host,” Roth told JNS. “It’s pretty clear from various discussions we’ve had with insiders that they’re hiding things that they have no business to hide.”
