31 Facts About Rasmea Odeh

Rasmea Yousef Odeh, known as Rasmea Yousef, Rasmieh Steve, and Rasmieh Joseph Steve, is a Palestinian Jordanian and former American citizen who was a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine convicted by Israeli military courts for involvement in a 1969 Jerusalem supermarket bombing which killed two young civilians.

Rasmea Odeh was sentenced to life in prison and spent 10 years there before being released in a 1980 prisoner exchange with the PFLP.

In 2014, Odeh was convicted of immigration fraud by a jury in federal court in Detroit for concealing her Israeli arrest and conviction.

Rasmea Odeh's counsel maintained she did not receive a "full and fair trial" because the judge ruled as irrelevant her testimony that her 1969 confession in Israel had been extracted by torture.

Rasmea Odeh's conviction was vacated by the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals and sent back to the District Court in February 2016.

Rasmea Odeh has said that she was born in Lifta in 1948, but that her family left for Ramallah when she was a month old.

Rasmea Odeh began attending communist meetings at the age of 12, joining the Arab Nationalist Movement at 13.

Rasmea Odeh's father returned in 1967 after breaking his leg in a work accident.

Rasmea Odeh "became convinced that military action was more important than social or political work" after the Six-Day War, throwing stones at Israelis and training to fire guns.

In December 1968 Rasmea Odeh left for Lebanon to register at Beirut Arab University, intending to study political economy and train with the PFLP there, and then for Amman, where Wadie Haddad gave her a letter of introduction to Bashir al-Khairi.

Rasmea Odeh was arrested in March 1969, confessed to investigators, and in 1970 was convicted and sentenced by an Israeli military court to life in prison for her perpetration of the two terrorist bombings in Jerusalem and for her involvement in the PFLP, an illegal organization.

Rasmea Odeh claimed that prison officials had stripped her naked and asked her father to have intercourse with her, at which point he fainted, and that only this had caused her to confess.

In 1969, the US Consul General in Jerusalem, Stephen James Campbell, visited her father in prison to check on his condition, and reported to Washington that Yousef Rasmea Odeh had "complain[ed] of uncomfortable, overcrowded jail conditions", but was otherwise receiving "no worse than standard treatment".

Rasmea Odeh did not deny her involvement in Women in Struggle, instead reminiscing with Aisha Odeh about their respective roles, and these statements correspond precisely to her 1969 confession.

In 1980, Rasmea Odeh was among 78 prisoners released by Israel in an exchange with the PFLP for one Israeli soldier captured in Lebanon.

Rasmea Odeh was sworn in as a naturalized US citizen under the name "Rasmieh Joseph Steve" on December 9,2004.

Rasmea Odeh appeared in the 2004 documentary Women in Struggle by Buthina Canaan Khoury, about four Palestinian women imprisoned in Israeli jails, which her opponents say provide evidence of her involvement in the bombings, as her co-conspirator Aisha Odeh freely implicated Rasmea Odeh in the bombing.

Rasmea Odeh became associate director of the Arab American Action Network in Chicago.

Rasmea Odeh was indicted on October 17,2013, for concealing her arrest, conviction, and imprisonment in her application, and for lying as to where she had lived previously.

Rasmea Odeh was arrested five days later at her home in Evergreen Park, Illinois, in the Chicago area.

In May 2014, Rasmea Odeh rejected a pre-trial offer from federal prosecutors that would have limited any prison sentence to a maximum of six months and, after that, allowed her to remain free until her deportation.

Rasmea Odeh said she felt it was not in her best interest, and preferred the case to go to trial.

Rasmea Odeh said that Odeh's lawyers were engaged in "careless and rank speculation" for suggesting that he could not be impartial in the case, stating that "a judge's prior activities relating to his religious convictions are not a valid basis for questioning his impartiality in a particular case".

Rasmea Odeh noted that some of the material brought forward applied to his cousin rather than himself.

Rasmea Odeh was accused of lying in her immigration papers about her prior residency, falsely claiming that she had lived only in Jordan from 1948 until her application.

Judge Drain ruled that evidence on these matters were irrelevant to whether Rasmea Odeh lied on her immigration documents, and disallowed testimony on these topics.

Rasmea Odeh was convicted of immigration fraud in federal court in Detroit on November 10,2014, for concealing her prior arrest, conviction, and imprisonment.

Rasmea Odeh had her bail revoked and was taken into custody upon the conclusion of her trial, as the judge found her to be a flight risk, and was incarcerated in Port Huron, Michigan.

Rasmea Odeh was allowed to go free on bail during her appeal.

On March 23,2017, Rasmea Odeh accepted a plea agreement where she would serve no prison time but would lose her US citizenship and be deported.

Rasmea Odeh was ordered to be deported to Jordan and to pay a $1,000 fine for immigration fraud.