By Henri E. Cauvin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, March 25, 2006; A05
Almost a quarter of a century after his bomb killed a teenager aboard a Pan Am flight bound for Honolulu, Mohammed Rashed was sentenced for the crime yesterday in federal court.
But in the complicated world of counterterrorism, saving lives is sometimes weighed against avenging deaths, and that is why Rashed, having agreed to cooperate with investigators, was ordered to spend just seven more years behind bars.
The 59-year-old Jordanian-born Palestinian has been in U.S. custody for eight years. He previously spent eight years in custody in Greece, where he was captured and tried, and two more detained in Egypt. When he is released in 2013 and deported, he will have spent about 25 years in custody.
But after listening yesterday to the words of some of the people who were aboard Flight 830, where Rashed admittedly took one life and was trying to take many more in the Aug. 11, 1982, attack, U.S. District Judge Royce C. Lamberth was troubled by the prospect of imposing such a short sentence on a man who had scarred so many people.
Lamberth accepted Rashed's secret December 2002 guilty plea to conspiracy and murder charges, just over a year after the Sept. 11 attacks. The plea, he said yesterday in court, "was less troubling" then.
Rashed had been a member of a pro-Palestinian group that in the 1980s undertook a terrorist campaign against U.S. and Israeli interests, according to prosecutors. The group, known as the 15th of May for the date in 1948 when the first Arab-Israeli War began, was based in Iraq, with operatives around the world.
By the time Rashed was brought to the United States in 1998, he had already been in custody for a decade. But prosecutors believed he could still help them. For the past three years, with his plea under seal, Rashed has been providing significant assistance, Justice Department prosecutors Scott J. Glick and Kenneth C. Kohl told Lamberth yesterday.
They did not elaborate in court about Rashed's cooperation, but after the sentencing they said that among the investigations he has aided is one in which a foreign government was able to charge two people in connection with a bombing that killed a 4-year-old girl.
But Lamberth said he was having a hard time reconciling that aid with statements in court yesterday from people aboard the flight and the sadness of the Japanese family whose teenage son died in the bomb blast.
Toru Ozawa was sitting in seat 47K -- the seat under which Rashed had secreted a bomb during the first leg of the plane's journey, from Baghdad to Tokyo. Rashed, his companion and their child left the plane in Tokyo. Ozawa and his family, bound for a vacation in Hawaii, got on.
When the bomb exploded about 140 miles outside Honolulu, Ozawa was killed and 15 other passengers were injured. As he watched his son dying before him, Shigetsugu Ozawa wanted his own life to end, too.
"At the time, my honest emotion was to wish the plane would crash into the Hawaiian ocean as I had lost the will to live since my son was no longer alive," the father, who was too ill to travel to the United States for the sentencing, said in a written statement read by the government.
Lamberth wondered aloud about what he should do. "I'm struggling with what options the court has," he said.
It is up to the executive branch, and not the courts, to wage the war on terrorism, he said. But, Lamberth said, he still must weigh all the interests involved. Glick said the government, too, had wrestled with those issues and ultimately decided the proposed sentence was the right course of action.
After hearing from Rashed's lawyer and from Rashed, who, through a translator, said he was "very, very sorry," Lamberth agreed, "with some trepidation" to impose the sentence.
