Soliah, right, appears in a Los Angeles court with her defense attorney

July 20, 1999
Web posted at: 2:47 p.m. EDT (1847 GMT)

In this story: Accused of murder conspiracy Hearst kidnapping RELATED STORIES, SITES

LOS ANGELES (CNN) -- Former 1970s fugitive Kathleen Ann Soliah, awaiting trial in Los Angeles on a charge that she planted pipe bombs under police cars, posted $1 million bail on Tuesday. Soliah, known as Sara Jane Olson in her Minnesota home town, was to be released later in the day.

She planned to meet with her attorneys in San Francisco from Wednesday through Friday, before returning to St. Paul, Minnesota, on Friday night.

Lawyers for Soliah, a former member of the radical Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) -- the group that kidnapped newspaper heiress Patricia Hearst in 1974 -- turned over the bail money at a hearing in Los Angeles.

Now married with three daughters, Soliah, 52, will be tracked by a electronic monitoring system to ensure her return to Los Angeles for trial. Her husband, an emergency room physician, was in the courtroom for Tuesday's bail hearing.

In arguing against electronic monitoring, defense attorney Susan Jordan said 250 people had contributed to the bail fund. Some are relatives, friends and neighbors who took out lines of credit on their homes and borrowed against retirement funds.

"In no way would Sara Jane Olson violate the trust of this many people, who contributed small and large amounts," Jordan said. "If she absconded, one of these 250 people would know about it before the electronic monitoring people."

Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Larry Fidler, however, approved the electronic monitoring and ordered weekly reports on Soliah's whereabouts until her next scheduled court appearance on August 31. No date for her trial has been set.

Charged with conspiracy to commit murder and other crimes, Soliah faces a maximum sentence of life in prison.

She is accused of placing pipe bombs under two Los Angeles police cars in retaliation for a 1974 shoot-out with police in which six SLA members were killed. The bombs did not go off.

FBI agents acting on a tip generated by the television show "America's Most Wanted" captured Soliah last month in St. Paul.

She was by all accounts a law-abiding, socially conscious member of her community -- reading to the blind, acting in theater productions and teaching English to immigrants.

Last week, in an emotional court appearance punctuated by the tears of her children and testimonials from friends, Soliah pleaded innocent. Her lawyers said there is no evidence to link her to the attempted bombings.

The leftist radicals of the SLA gained fame when they kidnapped Hearst, then 19, from an apartment in Berkeley, California. They demanded that her wealthy parents, Randolph and Catherine Hearst, distribute $6 million worth of food to the needy to secure her return.

Two months after the kidnapping, Hearst, who had adopted the name Tania, was photographed carrying a weapon during an SLA holdup of a San Francisco bank. After police captured Hearst in 1975, she claimed she had been brainwashed into participating in the SLA's crimes.

She was convicted of bank robbery and served two years of a seven-year prison term before President Jimmy Carter commuted her sentence. Today, she's a married mother living in Connecticut.

The Associated Press contributed to this report, written by Jim Morris

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