” Guilty “. Forty-three years after the bomb attack on the synagogue on rue Copernic in Paris, which killed four people and injured dozens in October 1980, the sole defendant, Hassan Diab, was sentenced on Friday in his absence to life imprisonment. Of this elusive defendant, whose chair remained empty in the courtroom, the court will have seen only black and white photos at various ages in his life. After three weeks of debates and nearly eight hours of deliberation, the special assize court of Paris decided between the only two possible options in this very singular trial.
“Is the accused guilty? “Yes,” replied the court, which sentenced the 69-year-old Lebanese-Canadian academic to the maximum sentence and issued a warrant for his arrest. The decision was greeted in great silence in the courtroom where some civil parties had rushed, who had demanded that “justice pass” after four decades of waiting. As soon as the deliberations were over, the victims hugged each other for a long time.
An uncertain extradition
The prosecution had requested this life sentence, the only “conceivable” for Hassan Diab, who is according to her, “without any possible doubt”, the author of this anti-Semitic attack almost 43 years ago, and the only involved in this case, one of the longest in French anti-terrorism. Not surprisingly either, as the hearing was marked by two antagonistic theses, the defense had pleaded acquittal, asking the five professional magistrates “to avoid a miscarriage of justice”.
The dossier is essentially based on intelligence, which attributed the attack in the 1980s – which was not claimed – to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-Special Operations (PFLP-OS), a dissident group from the PFLP. After a long suspension of the instruction, new information in 1999 designated the presumed members of the commando, including Hassan Diab, as the one who would have made the bomb before abandoning it in front of the synagogue.
Hassan Diab was initially dismissed in January 2018. Released, he returned to Canada. This dismissal had been reversed three years later by the Court of Appeal, which had ordered the holding of this trial for assassinations, attempted assassinations and aggravated destruction in connection with a terrorist enterprise. The outcome of a possible new extradition procedure is uncertain, the first, which was completed after six years, having strained diplomatic relations between France and Canada.