Riad Hamad was an outspoken advocate for the rights of the Palestinian people, and the founder of the Palestinian Children's Welfare Fund. He spent his own money from his salary as a teacher to send shipments of school supplies and medicine to children in Palestinian refugee camps. Despite the fact that Hamad's body was found bound and gagged, police have declared his death a suicide. James Mason is with the Austin Police Department. Less than a month before his death, Hamad emailed friends saying that the FBI had raided his home and taken more than fifty boxes. He also reported receiving death threats by phone around the same time. Eric Vasys is a representative of the local branch of the FBI: Although local law enforcement appears to have little interest in the circumstances surrounding Hamad's death, others in the community, including the Director of the Islamic Center of Greater Austin, Dr. Ibrahim Dremali, have questioned the official line that the death was a suicide. Dremali told an Austin radio station that police did not call the Islamic Center, as they normally do when a Muslim is killed or found dead, in order to ensure that proper burial rituals are followed. In this case, Dremali said, police conducted a full autopsy without the family's consent, before he, as the head of the mosque, was allowed access to the body. Dremali said that the body was in terrible shape - bruised and cut all over, and that the back of the skull had been bashed in, and the brain removed. If it turns out that Hamad was indeed assassinated for his support of the Palestinian cause, he would not be the first to be killed in the US for that reason. The Jewish Defense League, or JDL, has been listed as a terrorist group by the US government since the 1970s, when the group bombed the office of impresario Sol Hurok, killing his receptionist. The next year, Jerome Zeller, an American JDL member, was indicted on charges of planting the bomb at Hurok’s office. He moved to Israel to escape prosecution, and when the US government attempted extradition, he was told by the Israelis that Zeller was considered a 'national hero', and they would not agree to his extradition. Zeller was later reported living in the occupied West Bank among militant settlers. In 1985, the JDL was found to be responsible for the murder of Alex Odeh, 37, regional director of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee. I asked Eric Vasys of the Texas branch of the FBI if they had considered the possibility of JDL involvement, especially considering the death threats that Hamad had received: For KBOO News, I'm Jenka Soderberg.
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