Malki Roth was a bubbly 15-year-old who loved her family and friends, playing the flute and visiting her grandparents in Queens. She also loved pizza, which is what brought her to a popular central Jerusalem Sbarro’s on Aug. 9, 2001, to have lunch with a friend.
That’s when Hamas terrorist Abu Muhammad al-Masri walked into the busy restaurant — packed with Israelis and tourists — carrying a guitar case full of explosives, nails, nuts and bolts. The suicide bomber detonated his weapons, killing 15 people and injuring 130.
Among the seven children murdered was Malki, an American living in Jerusalem with her parents and six siblings. The family buried their daughter the next day alongside her closest friend, Michal Raziel, also killed in the attack.
“We knew the first part of our lives had come to an end,” Malki’s father, Arnold Roth, 69, told The Post. It’s a struggle to hold myself back from imagining how her life might have worked out.”
“I sometimes imagine how different the grief would be had [Malki been old enough] to marry and have children [first],” said her mother, Frimet Roth, 67. “A piece of her would have remained with us. But we are left with nothing of her.”
The Roths are appalled that one of the architects of their daughter’s murder walks free, enjoying the life Malki wasn’t allowed to live.
Ahlam Tamimi, a Jordanian, was 20 when she helped scout the Sbarro location — chosen because it was popular with kids and American tourists — and drove bomber al-Masri on the day of the attack. It was a year into the deadly second intifada, the Palestinian rising against Israel that brought terror to buses, restaurants and other populous locales.
Tamimi confessed to all the charges — always with a smile on her face — and was sentenced in Israel to 16 life sentences. But she ended up unexpectedly freed to Jordan in 2011 as part of prisoner swap for an Israeli soldier held hostage by Hamas.
Since then, Tamimi, now 40, has bragged about killing children. “I wanted to hide my smile, but I just couldn’t,” she said in a 2012 interview of her journey from the restaurant. “On the way back [to Ramallah on a public bus], we passed a Palestinian police checkpoint, and the policemen were laughing. One of them stuck his head in and said: ‘Congratulations to us all.'”