Palestinian extremist freed in hostage exchange set to speak at Detroit conference

A Palestinian extremist once jailed for attempted murder is slated to speak at the Detroit People’s Conference for Palestine later this month about “prisoners’ struggle in Zionist prisons.”

Hussam Shaheen, 53, is among two former prisoners who will attend the event starting on Aug. 29, with the man set to discuss his two decades in Israeli jail following his 2004 conviction for attempted murder.

Shaheen was released on Feb. 1 as part of a prisoner swap in exchange for living and dead hostages of the Oct. 7 terror attack.

Along with Shaheen, the People’s Conference for Palestine also invited Omar Assaf, 75, a former official of the left-wing Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine group, the Jerusalem Post reported.

The event, in its second year, is billed as a way for people to “hear directly about the prisoners’ struggle in Zionist prisons.”

Shaheen was accused in 2002 of establishing an al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigade extremist cell in Jebl Mukaber, with four of its members claiming that he recruited them and supplied them with weapons for an attack on Jerusalem that fell through.

Shaheen was arrested in 2004 in the West Bank and sentenced to 27 years in prison for attempted murder and conspiracy to commit murder, according to Israel’s Justice Ministry.

He was one of the hundreds of prisoners freed on Feb. 1 in the exchange for some of the hostages taken by Hamas.

Assaf was arrested in the West Bank during a raid in Ofer following the Oct. 7, 2023, terrorist attack, with Israel holding the 74-year-old for six months without charge.

Assaf was described as an official with the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP), a Marxist organization seeking to reform the Palestine Liberation Organization.

Assaf is now the coordinator of the executive committees of the Palestinian Popular Conference, which had previously praised the Oct. 7 terrorist attack and called for violence against the Zionist Israeli enemy,” according to the Jerusalem Post.

Since his release in April 2024, Assaf has repeatedly spoken out about the alleged torture and regular beatings of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli prisons.

The People’s Conference for Palestine has previously invited controversial guests to their events, with last year’s conference in Detroit including Wisam Rafeedie, a member of the PFLP terror group and Sana Daqa’a, the wife of PFLP terrorist Walid Daqu’a, who was convicted of commanding an operation that kidnapped and killed an Israeli soldier in 1984.