SUPREME COURT OF THE STATE OF NEW YORK

COUNTY OF NEW YORK

____________________________________x
GUY OPHIR, YAIR OPHIR a/k/a YAHYA
OPHIR, Index No. 112125/09

Plaintiffs,
Against COMPLAINT

DONALD BOSTROM, AFTONBLADET

NEWSPAPER OF THE SWEDISH TRADE
UNION CONFEDERATION,
Defendants.
____________________________________x

Plaintiffs, pro se, hereby complain against the defendants and alleges as
follows:
Parties
1. Plaintiff Guy Ophir is a resident of Israel, a citizen of Israel and
Germany, with business connections and clients in New York.
2. Plaintiff Yair Ophir a/k/a Yahya is a resident of Israel, a citizen
of Israel and Germany and is the biological brother of Plaintiff Guy Ophir.
3. Defendant Donald Bostrom is, upon information and belief, a
resident of Sweden who currently works as a journalist and upon information
and belief has authored several cookbooks.
4. Defendant Aftonbladet is a Swedish newspaper with one of the
largest circulations in the Nordic countries. It is owned by the Swedish Trade
Union Confederation and Norwegian media group Schibsted, a media group
with approximately 8,100 employees and operations in 22 countries.
5. Defendant Bostrom is the author of the libelous article and
Defendant Aftonbladet is the publisher of the libelous article.
6. Defendants maintain presence in New York via their permanent
representative "Per Bjurman" at 330 East 38th Street, New York, NY 10016
with a telephone number which is (212) 375-1550.

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 7. Defendants have the physical, logistical and financial means to
investigate the occurrence of news within New York State via their permanent
representative in New York.
8. Defendants ordinarily perform news gathering in New York or
from New York media sources..
9. The libelous article and statements have a particular local impact
in New York, as it is claimed that New York residents benefit from alleged
crimes of organ theft from Palestinian bodies, and by insinuation New York
doctors perform such clandestine surgeries, that New York's points of entry and
airport customs are used for the transport of Palestinian kidneys and other body
parts, and that there is a "black market" for Palestinian kidneys in New York
which were violently removed from "stone throwing boys" before being killed
or shot.
10. Plaintiff Guy Ophir served in the Israeli army and was deployed
in military fireteams or squads that operated in "the northern parts of the West
Bank" including the outskirts of Imatin" the village mentioned in the article.
11. Plaintiff Guy Ophir still serves in the described area when called
for his reserve duty.
12. Plaintiff Yair Ophir a/k/a Yahya served in the Israeli army in
1992 in an elite paratrooper unit which was deployed in military fireteams or
squads that operated in "the northern parts of the West Bank" including "the
outskirts of Imatin", the village mentioned in the article in 1992.
13. Plaintiff Yair Ophir served as a commander, and during his
service was known informally as Yahya or commander Yahya or Captain
Yahya. (Reference to "Captain Yahya is specifically made in the Article).
14. Plaintiffs never wounded or killed any Palestinians and never
shot anyone with intentions to kill.

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 15. Plaintiffs are entitled to domestic treatment under the Treaty of
Friendship Navigation and Commerce between Israel and the US (1951) and
the Free Trade Agreement between the US and Israel (1985)1.

Facts
16. On or about August 17, 2009 Defendants published an article
authored by Bostrom entitled "Our Sons Are Plundered of Their Organs".
17. The article and accompanying photographs which appeared in the
Culture section of the newspaper purportedly reported that Israeli soldiers
under commandment of Captain Yaya in the northern parts of the West Bank
and in the outskirts of the small village of Imatim targeted to kill and actually
did cut body organs from Palestinians, based on verbal statements of family
members of Bilal Ghanan who died in May 1992, and "a great number of
families", and that the body organs are sold in New York State by Rabbis who
traffic in them to accommodate New York patients in 2009.
18. The article further stated that members of the Israeli Defense
forces that operated in the Northern parts of the West Bank intentionally hunt
and ambush Palestinians in order to murder them for the purpose of harvesting
their body organs so as to supply an alleged shortage of body parts in
cooperation with Israeli governmental authorities spearheaded by the Minister
of Health at the time, Ehud Olmert, and certain New York figures, particularly
one Brooklyn resident Levy Yitzhak Rosenbaum, allegedly serving as a
middleman or matchmaker who orchestrates transactions in New York State to
sell to New York State residents Palestinian kidneys at $160,000 a piece.

1
See: Irish Nat'l Ins. Co. v. Aer Lingus Teoranta, 739 F.2d 90, 92 (2nd Cir. 1984): "Under the terms
of a separate treaty between the United States and Ireland, appellant was entitled to "national treatment
with respect to . . . having access to the courts of justice . . ., both in pursuit and in defense of [its]
rights." Treaty of Friendship, Commerce and Navigation, Jan. 21, 1950, United States-Ireland, art.
VI(1)(c), 1 U.S.T. 785, 790-91, T.I.A.S. No. 2155, at 8. Because of the existence of the two
international compacts, the district court should have applied the same forum non conveniens standards
that it would have applied to a United States citizen".

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 19. The article states: "young men have been siezed, and made to
serve as organ reserve, just as in China and Pakistan, before being killed". The
claim that stone throwing boys' organs are taken before being killed is repeated
at least twice.
20. The Article's sub-heading states "Palestinians accuse the Israel
Defense Forces of taking organs from their victims. Donald Boström writes
about an international organ trafficking scandal - and about the time he saw the
cut-up dead body of a nineteen-year old Palestinian".
21. The article itself states that a resident of Brooklyn, "Rosenbaum
was arrested and a vast, Sopranos-like, imbroglio of money-laundering and
illegal organ-trade was revealed in New Jersey: Rabbis, politicians and trusted
civil servants had for years been involved in money laundering and illegal
organ-trade. Rosenbaum’s matchmaking had nothing to do with romance. It
was all about buying and selling kidneys from Israel on the black market.
Rosenbaum says that he buys the kidneys for 10 000 dollars, from poor people.
He then proceeds to sell the organs to desperate patients in the States for
160,000 dollars".
22. Elsewhere it was reported that Rosenbaum's "matchmaking" of
medical procedures have occurred at Mount Sinai hospital in New York.
23. As some sort of corroboration to the claim that illegal trafficking
in organs occurs in New York, the article cites a statement from a professor on
the Board of the New York based National Kidney Foundation.
24. Thereafter, in a twisted and warped connection, the article jumps
to a description of an alleged national campaign in Israel to collect body parts
from Palestinians headed by Ehud Olmert, a former prime minister, as follows:
"In the summer of 1992, Ehud Olmert, then minister of health, tried to address
the issue of organ shortage by launching a big campaign aimed at having the
Israeli public register for postmortal organ donation…While the campaign was
running, young Palestinian men started to disappear from villages in the West
Bank and Gaza. After five days Israeli soldiers would bring them back dead,

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with their bodies ripped open. Talk of the bodies terrified the population of the
occupied territories. There were rumors of a dramatic increase of young men
disappearing, with ensuing nightly funerals of autopsied bodies".
25. The author, Defendant Bostrom places himself in the scene of the
alleged plot in 1992 as follows: "I then travelled around interviewing a great
number of Palestinian families in the West Bank and Gaza - meeting parents
who told of how their sons had been deprived of organs before being killed.
One example that I encountered on this eerie trip was the young stone-thrower
Bilal Achmed Ghanan. The families in the West Bank and in Gaza felt that
they knew exactly what had happened: "Our sons are used as involuntary organ
donors," relatives of Khaled from Nablus told me, as did the mother of Raed
from Jenin and the uncles of Machmod and Nafes from Gaza, who had all
disappeared for a number of days only to return at night, dead and autopsied".
26. In order to lend fake credibility to the story using aid of statistics,
the article states that there are at least 69 confirmed cases of Palestinians
hunted down by IDF for killing for organs as follows: "133 Palestinians killed
in various ways that year. According to the Palestinian statistics the causes of
death were: shot in the street, explosion, tear gas, deliberately run over, hanged
in prison, shot in school, killed at home etcetera. The 133 people killed were
between four months to 88 years old. Only half of them, 69 victims, went
through postmortem examination. The routine autopsy of killed Palestinians –
of which the army spokesperson was talking - has no bearing on the reality in
the occupied territories. The questions remain".
27. Defendants also published the following: "The relatives of the
dead Palestinians no longer harbored any doubts as to the reasons for the
killings We know that Israel has a great need for organs, that there is a vast
and illegal trade of organs which has been running for many years now, that the
authorities are aware of it and that doctors in managing positions at the big
hospitals participate, as well as civil servants at various levels. We also know
that young Palestinian men disappeared, that they were brought back after five

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days, at night, under tremendous secrecy, stitched back together after having
been cut from abdomen to chin. It’s time to bring clarity to this macabre
business, to shed light on what is going on and what has taken place in the
territories occupied by Israel since the Intifada began".
28. The article describes a group of soldiers headed by Captain
Yahya: "Captain Yahya is the worst of them all," smoking cigarettes and
drinking cans of Coca Cola while calmly aiming through broken windows to
pull the trigger, while "not even a cat could move outdoors without risking its
life" against the background of an "overpowering silence of the dark night
[which] was only interrupted by quiet sobbing". Later, as the Palestinian Bilal
was being buried, "sharp noises from the shovels", the soldiers of Captain
Yahya "exchanged some jokes".
29. Upon information and belief, and according to the article's
description the group of soldiers led by plaintiff Yahya was less than 20
persons.

FIRST CAUSE OF ACTION

30. The statements were false and libelous: the Plaintiffs and IDF
soldiers never ambushed Palestinians for organ harvesting. The Plaintiffs and
IDF soldiers never received orders from the military or government to target
Palestinians to supply a shortage of body parts. There was never any incident
of body parts of boys being cut for "harvesting" or "plundering" before being
killed, or after while the Plaintiffs served in the Northern parts of the West
Bank. There was never any connection between the 1992 Bilal incident and the
rabbi in New York who allegedly trafficked in organs in New York in 2009.
There was never any governmental campaign by the Minister of Health to
supply shortage of organs by killing Palestinians. Palestinian sons or boys
were not plundered for their organs. There was no national campaign to kill
Palestinians for organs. Further, stone-throwing is not an innocent hobby of
the youths.

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 31. The incredibility of the article is clear since it is illogical that
soldiers would shot a target in the chest, if the target is supposed to be
harvested for his kidney, and especially so given that organs don’t last very
long and have to be matched rather particularly with a patient in advance for
blood tests and other matching factors.
32. It is just as illogical that a bleeding kidney would be transported
from the "outskirts of Imatin, a small village in the northern parts of the West
Bank" via checkpoints into Israel, out of Israeli airport and into an American
airport, and from there to Mount Sinai Hospital in New York to accommodate
American patients.
33. Moreover, despite the allegation that Defendant Bostrom "was in
the area at the time, working on a book", and that someone may have told him
that "organ theft definitely occurred", or brokering of organ transactions or
sales of organs, Defendant Bostrom did not witness any activity in connection
with organ theft or organ brokering or organ selling.
34. To the extent Defendant Bostrom claims that "On an assignment
from a broadcasting network I then travelled around interviewing a great
number of Palestininan families in the West Bank and Gaza - meeting parents
who told of how their sons had been deprived of organs before being killed",
Defendant Bostrom did not have a slight shred of evidence to support the
claims, or to couch them in innuendos as if "a great number of families" can
credibly attest to systematic killings for organs and organ thefts.
35. Further, the article's general description as if in 1992 the
atmosphere in Israel was hostile to Palestinians was completely false and
misleading. Bostrom places the "story" in 1992. However in 1992 there was
no intifada, and on the contrary, the Israeli public elected Yizhak Rabin in 1991
as Prime Minister, and immediately thereafter the Oslo peace negotiations
started, which led to a breakthrough in negotiations with Yasser Arafat, and to
both leaders receiving a Nobel prize in 1994.

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 36. Defendants made no attempt to seek corroboration from the
obvious sources, many of them located in New York.
37. Defendants relied on questionable sources or sources with
reputation of persistent inaccuracies and/or sources with vindictive motives.
38. Said statements lacked any newsworthy value.
39. Said statements lacked any slight social value which may justify
them even remotely as a step to exposition of some concealed truth.
40. Said statements lacked any "neutral reporting" features.
41. Said statements were not "hot news". There was no possible
immediate public concern or public interest or any deadline pressure.
42. Defendants had ample time to double check every fact and
allegation. Defendants had sufficient time to employ reasonable investigative
techniques to verify or discredit the truth of falsehoods contained in the
statements.
43. Said libelous statements were disseminated in hard print and
electronically with intent to be published in New York and worldwide and
distributed in New York and worldwide, and/or republished or redistributed by
third parties in the State of New York and worldwide by third parties and over
the internet.
44. In particular, dissemination of the libel occurred in this forum at
the Church of Sweden, 5 East 48th Street, New York, NY and elsewhere.
45. Also, the libelous article states that this forum, New York served
as the situs where the benefits of the body organ harvesting were commercially
exploited, by New York matchmakers and New York patients.
46. Among other things, said statements were made with knowledge
that they were false and/or with reckless disregard to their truth or falsity and/or
with a high degree of awareness of the probable falsities.
47. Said statements were made with actual malicious intent to
ridicule, harm, destroy reputation and lower the esteem of the Plaintiffs who

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are members the IDF, and were one of the soldiers on "assignments" in the
West Bank with Captain Yahya mentioned in the article.
48. In fact, defendants intended to portray Plaintiffs and Israeli
soldiers and Jews in a manner reminiscent of the medieval blood libels
depicting Israelites and Jews as feasting on the blood of others, drinking the
blood of Christian children for ritual purposes, baking matzas for Passover with
the blood of Christian children, or using the blood of Christian boys for
medicinal purposes. [The Church of Sweden in Uppsala for example still
displays pictures of Jews in obscene acts with pigs "Judensau"].
49. The Defendants were motivated by actual malice, since the
libelous words are no more than horrible and repugnant piece of neo-
antisemitic hate speech and Nazi-style propaganda.
50. Defendants, knowingly or with reckless disregard intended to
incite racism, xenophobia and anti-Semitism, which caused injury to Plaintiffs
and others similarly situated, with intention to destroy support, investments and
businesses with members of the IDF, Jews and Israelis in New York, Sweden,
Israel and elsewhere.
51. Defendants were or, through the exercise of reasonable
investigation should be, aware that the “crimes” reported by Aftonbladet are
precisely the kind of rational used by terrorists to incite violence against Jews
and that such claims amount to an incitement to do immediate bodily harm to
Jewish people, Israeli’s and specifically to the Plaintiffs.
52. The statements were published without Defendants believing in
the truths therein, except that Defendants believed that they are immune from
saying the truth by the doctrine of free speech and therefore can publish
whatever they want regardless of how false, offensive and spiteful the content
is.
53. Defendants knew that the statements contained fabrications in the
sense of concocting a picture made of totally unrelated pieces of rumors,
speculation, radically loose connectivity in subject matter and in time, inspired

9
by a large dose of author imagination, and the assertion of allegations that are
so inherently improbable that only a reckless person would put them into
circulation, and despite obvious reasons to doubt the veracity of the informants
upon whom the article is based or the inaccuracy plus self interest of his
reports.
54. Defendants also knew that attempts to sue Israeli soldiers in
various international forums for war crime are festering in all parts of the
world, and Defendants intended to falsely induce institution of false legal
charges in various courts against Plaintiffs and others as follows: "a very
serious accusation, with enough question marks to motivate the International
Court of Justice (ICJ) to start an investigation about possible war crimes".
55. As a result, Plaintiffs have become fearful to freely travel or visit
certain countries including Sweden because of to the unfounded call to indict
the Plaintiffs and possibly issue Interpol arrest warrants against them.
56. Post-publication, Defendant Bostrom admitted that he had “no
idea", and "no clue” if the allegations he made in his article are true and
admitted to having conducted no investigation to verify the truth or falsity of
the allegations prior to publication.
57. Defendant Aftonbladet irresponsibly allowed a libelous and
hateful article to be published without insisting on the usual journalistic ethics
solely in an effort to recruit support for the Palestinian cause by promoting such
anti-Semitic and hateful speech.
58. Defendant Aftonbladet's conduct was highly unreasonable
because, among other things, it extremely departed from the standards of
investigation and reporting ordinarily adhered to by responsible publishers.
59. As a direct and proximate result of the Defendants' misconduct,
Plaintiffs reputation has been irreparably harmed, causing Plaintiffs to suffer
compensable injuries, and but for Defendants' unlawful acts, Plaintiffs would
not have incurred these losses.

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 60. Defendants were asked to retract their comments or publish an
apology, yet they declined to do so.
61. The Defendants' conduct was sufficiently willful and outrageous
to warrant an award of punitive damages.
62. Since the libel attributes criminal conduct to the Plaintiffs, it is
libel per se, (See, United Nations Convention against Transnational Organized
Crime, which covers prevention, enforcement and sanctions in trafficking of
humans, includes in its definition of human exploitation the extraction of
organs for profit). Therefore damages are presumed.
63. Therefore Defendants are liable to compensate Plaintiffs in the
amount of $7,500,000, and Plaintiff are entitled to recover this amount from
Defendants.

WHEREFORE, Plaintiffs demand the following relief in the form of a

judgment in their favor and against the Defendants: (i) Compensatory and
punitive damages in accordance with the proof at trial; and (ii) the costs of this
suit and such other relief as is the Court deems just and appropriate.

Respectfully submitted,

Guy Ophir, Yair Ophir

Plaintiffs pro se
50 Lexington Avenue, #200
New York, NY 10010
Tel. 646-707-9096
Email: guy@ophirlaw.com
To Defendants' attorneys:
Adam Baker, Esq.
Alston & Bird, LLP
90 Park Avenue
New York, NY 10016
Tel: (212) 210-9488, Fax: (212) 922-3948
Email: Adam.Baker@alston.com
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