Paris: A Lebanese-Canadian university professor has been convicted by a Paris court for his involvement in a deadly bombing of a synagogue in Paris more than 42 years ago.
The judges ruled that Hassan Diab, 69, was the man who planted the motorcycle bomb in Rue Copernic on 3 October 1980, killing four people and injuring 38 others.
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According to a BBC report, Diab was sentenced to life imprisonmet, but he called his situation “Kafkaesque” and refused to attend the trial. Supporters of Diab have condemned the trial as “manifestly unfair,” while prosecutors argued it was “beyond possible doubt” that he was behind the bombing.
The Rue Copernic attack was the first to target Jews in France since World War Two and became a template for many other similar attacks linked to militants in the Middle East in the years that followed.
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The decades-long investigation became a byword for protracted judicial confusion, as well as for the dogged determination of a handful of magistrates not to let the case be forgotten.
Diab is a Lebanese of Palestinian origin who obtained Canadian nationality in 1993 and teaches sociology in Ottawa.
He was first named as a suspect on the basis of new evidence in 1999, nearly 20 years after the killings.
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Eight years later, the French issued an international arrest warrant, and it was not until 2014 that Canada agreed to extradite Diab.
In 2018, French magistrates declared the case closed for lack of proof, allowing Diab to return to Canada.
Finally, in 2021, an appeal against the closure of the case was upheld in the Supreme Court, which meant a trial could finally go ahead.
From the start, Diab protested his innocence and did not return to France for the trial, which was conducted in his absence. His conviction means that a second extradition request will have to follow, though with strong doubts over whether it will succeed.
During the three-week trial, the court heard an account of the known facts of the case, plus arguments identifying Diab as the bomber and counter-evidence suggesting he was a victim of mistaken identity.
None of the original investigating team was alive to speak, and the surviving witnesses who saw the attacker in 1980 admitted that after more than 40 years, their memories were too hazy to be reliable.
The bomber was identified as having a fake Cypriot passport bearing the name Alexander Panadriyu.
He was believed to have entered France from another European country as part of a larger group, and to have bought the motorbike at a shop near the Arc de Triomphe.
He was thought to belong to a dissident Palestinian group called the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-Special Operations (PFLP-SO).
The core of the prosecution case rested on the passport. Under questioning while in custody, Diab explained that he had lost the passport just a month before the attack. But in Lebanon, a French judge found an official declaration for the lost passport – a declaration made in 1983 and with a date of loss in April 1981.
The defence argued that all of this was circumstantial, and that there was still no hard evidence that Diab was in France in October 1980.
Handwriting analysts who said the hotel registration form signed by the attacker was consistent with Diab’s script were also dismissed as inconclusive.
Despite this, the prosecutor argued that “with Hassan Diab, we have the bomb-maker and the bomb-planter. That’s already something.” Following the verdict, the Hassan Diab Support Committee in Canada called on Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to make it “absolutely clear” that no second extradition would be accepted.