Editorial: Release of terrorist an outrage

Thursday, Dec. 22, 2005 | 7:39 a.m.

For all of the help our country has given Germany over the past 50 years, we have asked for little in return except friendship. But in freeing the terrorist Mohammed Ali Hamadi, a shocking action announced Tuesday, Germany acted not like a friend, but as one who was stabbing us in the back.

Hamadi brutally beat and killed U.S. Navy diver Robert Dean Stethem, 23, who specialized in underwater construction. Hamadi and three Hezbollah accomplices had hijacked a plane on which Stethem was a passenger. They forced the plane to Beirut, Lebanon, where they tied up and beat Stethem because of his military service.

Other passengers were also beaten, but all were eventually released except for Stethem, who was killed by Hamadi. Stethem's body was dumped on the tarmac of the Beirut airport.

Germany captured Hamadi in 1987 as he was passing through the Frankfurt airport with explosives in his luggage. The country should have turned him over to the United States, as we had asked. Instead, Hamadi was tried in Germany and sentenced to life imprisonment with the possibility of parole. He was released Dec. 15, three days before a German hostage was released by terrorists in Iraq.

Germany says Hamadi was legally due for release, and that it was not related to the freeing of the German hostage. Whatever the reason, it was an outrage. Hamadi is back in Lebanon now, free to hook up with other terrorists there and plot more attacks.

If Germany felt it had to parole Hamadi, it should have allowed U.S. agents to take him into custody before he had a chance to take one breath of free air.