- By Hugh Schofield
- BBC News, Paris
April 21, 2023 at 17:20 CET
Updated 25 minutes ago
picture description,
The Rue Copernic attack was the first attack on Jews in France since World War II
More than 42 years after the deadly bomb attack on a Paris synagogue, a court in Paris has convicted a Lebanese-Canadian university professor of the attack.
The judges ruled that Hassan Diab, 69, was the young man who planted the rue Copernic motorcycle bomb on October 3, 1980.
The bombing killed four people and injured 38 others.
Diab refused to attend the trial, but the judges sentenced him to life imprisonment.
Prosecutors had argued that there was “no doubt” that he was behind the bombing. His supporters have condemned the trial as “manifestly unfair”.
The attack on Rue Copernic was the first attack on Jews in France since World War II, and became a template for many other similar attacks involving militants in the Middle East in the years that followed.
The decades-long investigation became the epitome of both protracted legal confusion and the dogged determination of a handful of judges not to let the case be forgotten.
Diab, 69, a Lebanese of Palestinian descent who received Canadian citizenship in 1993 and teaches sociology in Ottawa, was first named a suspect based on new evidence in 1999, almost 20 years after the killings.
Image credit: LARS HAGBERG/AFP
picture description,
Hassan Diab denied involvement in the bombing and refused to leave Canada to attend the trial
Eight years later, the French issued an international arrest warrant, and Canada only agreed to extradition in 2014. But in 2018, French judges declared the case closed for lack of evidence, allowing Diab to return to Canada.
Finally, in 2021, an appeal against the case being dropped was upheld by the Supreme Court, the first time this had ever happened in a French terrorism case. It meant a trial could finally take place, which began earlier this month.
Diab has maintained his innocence from the start and has not returned to France for the trial, which took place in his absence. His conviction means that a second extradition request must follow, albeit with serious doubts about its success.
In response to the ruling, Canada’s Hassan Diab Support Committee called on Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to “make it absolutely clear” that a second extradition would not be accepted.
They said 15 years of legal “nightmare … is now fully exposed in its overwhelming cruelty and injustice.”
Over three weeks, the court heard a report of the known facts of the case, plus arguments identifying Diab as the assassin and counterevidence suggesting he was the victim of a mistaken identity.
picture description,
Police released an artist rendering of the bomber in 1980
None of the original investigative teams were alive to speak, and the surviving witnesses who saw the attacker in 1980 all admitted their memories, after more than 40 years, were too hazy to be reliable.
The bomb was left in the saddlebag of a Suzuki motorcycle outside a synagogue in Paris’s affluent 16th arrondissement. Had there not been a delay, the sidewalk would have been packed with people leaving the service inside.
In 1980, investigations initially focused on neo-Nazis, and there were mass demonstrations by the political left. But a claim by an ultra-right group turned out to be bogus, and by the end of the year attention had shifted to a Middle East link.
The assassin was identified as the holder of a fake Cypriot passport with the name Alexander Panadriyu.
He is said to have entered France as part of a larger group from another European country and bought the bike from a shop near the Arc de Triomphe.
He was believed to belong to a Palestinian dissident group called the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine – Special Operations (PFLP-SO).
But the investigation hit a wall, and it wasn’t until 1999 that Hassan Diab’s name emerged from new information believed to be from the former Soviet bloc.
Image credit, GEORGES GOBET/AFP
picture description,
The attack was eventually blamed on a Palestinian dissident group – the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-Special Operations
Italian authorities then revealed that in 1981 a Hassan Diab’s passport was found at Rome Airport in the possession of a senior figure in the PFLP-SO. The passport bore stamps showing the holder entering and leaving Spain around the dates of the Rue Copernic attack.
The core of the criminal case rested on the passport.
When questioned in custody, Diab said he lost the passport just a month before the attack. But in Lebanon, a French judge found an official explanation for the lost passport – an explanation from 1983 and with a loss date of April 1981.
The defense argued that all of this was circumstantial and that there was still no conclusive evidence that Diab was in France in October 1980. They produced testimonies from friends in Beirut who said Diab was taking university exams at the time of the attack.
Handwriting analysts who said the hotel registration form signed by the attacker matched Diab’s script were also dismissed as inconclusive.
“The only legally possible decision – even if it is humanely difficult – is an acquittal,” said defense attorney William Bourdon in his balance sheet on Thursday. “I’m here before you to prevent a miscarriage of justice.”
But prosecutor Benjamin Chambre, while regretting that all the other members of the terror group fled without charge, said: “In Hassan Diab we have the bomb maker and the bomb planter. That’s something.”