Spanish prosecutor backs extraditing US media heir for alleged Hamas donations

MADRID — A Spanish prosecutor on Friday expressed support for a US request to extradite alleged Hamas donor and multimillionaire US media heir James Cox Chambers Jr., in a case Chambers’s defense says is politically motivated.

Spain’s High Court will rule on the case in the coming weeks. Government spokesperson Elma Saiz has said the cabinet would then make the final determination.

The case is politically sensitive for Spain’s Socialist-led government, known for its strong pro-Palestinian stance, which has drawn rebuke from the Trump administration and contributed to wider tensions with Washington.

Chambers, known as Fergie, was arrested at the request of US authorities on July 10 while on holiday in Ibiza and has been held since then. The extradition request lists riot, conspiracy to commit riot and international money laundering, the court heard.

The reference to riot relates to the 2023 targeting by pro-Palestinian activists of Israeli defense firm Elbit Systems in New Hampshire.

A self-described anti-imperialist and communist, Chambers has called in interviews and on social media for the destruction of the United States. He received $250 million after divesting from his family’s media conglomerate, Cox Enterprises, in 2023, his spokesperson said.

The US wants Chambers for, among other charges, allegedly sending $7.5 million from the US to a Tunisian bank account several years ago when he lived in that country, according to the UK’s Guardian newspaper, which cited Chambers’s legal representative. The money was allegedly then used to support Hamas.

The Guardian also noted that a week after the Hamas-led October 7, 2023, invasion of southern Israel that killed 1,200 people, mostly civilians, Chambers posted to X, “No faction of the Palestinian resistance, Hamas or other, has done *anything* wrong.”

Additionally, he has donated over $1 million to humanitarian causes in Gaza and paid legal fees for some members of the activist group Palestine Action, according to his legal team.

The group was designated as a terrorist organization by the US and UK for actions that include targeting Israel-linked defense companies. The UK ban came into force on July 5, 2025, shortly after a break-in at the Royal Air Force’s Brize Norton base in June 2025, when activists damaged two military planes. In June, a judge jailed four activists for raiding a site of Israeli defense company Elbit near Bristol, in western England, in 2024 and causing over a million pounds in damage. One of them hit a police officer twice on the back with a sledgehammer, leaving her with a fractured spine.

“The extradition request is not based on mere ideology or political statements, but on an organized, financed and executed action that caused significant material damage and the evaluation of which corresponds to the competent US court,” prosecutor Juan Hernandez Villalba told the court.

Chambers has said he was present at the protests but caused no damage. He said he transferred his own money to Tunisia, where he was living, to fund his company’s sponsorship of Tunisian soccer club, Club Africain, as well as a gym.

“To this day I cannot understand why I have been in prison since July … All I’m asking for is justice, reason, and mercy,” he told the court.

He has denied wrongdoing, applied for asylum in Spain on the grounds of political persecution and refused on Friday to consent to extradition. Under Spanish law, extradition cannot proceed if a request ​is found to be politically motivated.

His lawyer Aitor Martinez said even the people who carried out the damage in New Hampshire were convicted of misdemeanors, an offense that carries a 60-day sentence and falls below the one-year threshold of the US-Spain extradition treaty.

The US Department of Justice has declined to comment on the case against Chambers, whose father is James Cox Chambers, billionaire part-owner of Cox Enterprises.