Odeh, Mohamed Sadeek (1965–)

Mohamed Sadeek Odeh was one of the first two people convicted of playing a direct role in the August 7, 1998, terrorist bombing of the U.S. embassy in Nairobi, Kenya. On May 29, 2001, a federal jury in New York found him guilty of participating in the attack and of murdering the 213 people, including 12 Americans, killed as a result of the explosion. Prosecutors had not sought the death penalty against Odeh, but the trial judge sentenced him to life in U.S. prison without the possibility of parole.

Odeh, a Jordanian and Kenyan national of Palestinian heritage, was one of four defendants who went on trial in Manhattan federal court in January 2001 for the Kenya bombing and the coordinated but less lethal bombing of the U.S. embassy in Dar es Salaam, where 11 people were killed. He and his codefendants were all found to be part of a worldwide terrorist conspiracy led by Saudi exile Osama bin Laden and carried out by his Islamic militant organization, Al Qaeda. Odeh, who underwent weapons and explosives training at Al Qaeda camps inside Afghanistan in 1992, admitted to being a “soldier” of the group who had sworn a loyalty oath, or bayat, to bin Laden.

Odeh was born in Saudi Arabia in 1965 and grew up in Jordan. He studied engineering and architecture at a university in Manila starting in 1986, and it was in the Philippines where he was exposed to radical Islam and gained interest in the anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan. In 1990, he went to join the mujahideen. With the Afghan conflict winding down, Odeh was among the militants dispatched to Somalia in 1993 to train native Somalis who, like Al Qaeda, considered the U.S. military presence there “colonization,” although the mission began as part of a U.N. peacekeeping operation. Somali fighters killed 18 U.S. Army Rangers in an October 1993 battle in the capital city of Mogadishu.

In 1994, Odeh settled near the Somalia-Kenya border in the coastal city of Mombasa, where he supported himself and Al Qaeda with a fishing boat supplied by the group. Odeh met and married a Kenyan woman and fathered two children, one of whom was born after his arrest, and he never saw.

Odeh was in custody since the day of the embassy bombings. He had fled Kenya the night before on a flight to Karachi with another conspirator who passed Pakistani immigration officials without incident. But at Karachi Airport, just hours before the explosions, officials detected Odeh's Yemeni passport was fake—the picture did not resemble Odeh—and detained him.

In his postarrest statements to the FBI, Odeh said he felt a moral responsibility for the embassy bombings, because of he was a paid member of Al Qaeda. He denied a role in the plot, but trial evidence implicated him. Clothes inside his carry-on luggage were laced with TNT residue. In the days before the attack, Odeh had stayed a mile from the target at the same downtown Nairobi hotel as other bombing conspirators and registered under the name on his fake passport. His fingerprint was found on the East Africa cell leader's hotel room door.

Prosecutors described Odeh as a “technical adviser” to the Kenya bombing. In his mud-walled, thatched-roof home in rural Witu, Kenya, investigators found two handwritten sketches of the embassy compound and roads surrounding it. They also found an Arabic ledger detailing his fishing expenses; it had one entry listing $1,400 in weapons and artillery for “work,” a code word for jihad. Odeh told the FBI that other Al Qaeda code words were “tools” for weapons, “papers” for fake documents, “soap” for TNT, and “potatoes” for grenades.

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