Airline bomber to be freed from US prison
The Australian -- Mar 17
A Jordanian-born Palestinian man convicted of the 1982 bombing of a Pan Am flight travelling to Hawaii from Japan is set to be released from a US prison.
Mohammed Rashed has been behind bars for more than two decades after leaving a bomb under a jetliner seat that exploded on Pan Am Flight 830 from Tokyo to Honolulu on August 11, 1982, killing a Japanese teenager and injuring at least 15 other people.
Justice Department spokesman Dean Boyd says Rashed, 63, has served about 23 years in prison, including time served in Greek and US jails, over the bomb plot.
The Federal Bureau of Prisons, which published his release date of Wednesday, said he is currently being held at the Federal Correctional Institution, McKean, a medium-security jail in Pennsylvania.
The explosives expert was part of 15 May, an Iraq-based pro-Palestinian group that targeted US and Israeli interests in the 1980s, and received leniency in his Pan Am sentence for co-operating with international authorities as an informant.
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