Hassan Diab sentenced in his absence to life imprisonment

Forty-three years after the attack on the synagogue on rue Copernic in Paris, the special assize court sentenced the sole defendant, the Lebanese-Canadian Hassan Diab, to life imprisonment. The latter, who was absent, protests his innocence. The prosecution had requested this maximum sentence, the only “conceivable” against the 69-year-old academic, believing that he was, “without any possible doubt”, the author of this anti-Semitic attack, which killed four people almost 43 years ago. The defense pleaded acquittal.

Hassan Diab was the only person responsible for the bomb attack which targeted the synagogue on rue Copernic and killed four people and injured dozens on October 3, 1980. The file was based mainly on intelligence, which attributed in the 1980s the attack – which has not been claimed – on the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-Special Operations (FPLP-OS), a dissident group of 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 made the bomb and abandoned it in front of the synagogue.

Read also“Copernic Street attack: the instrumentalization of a moribund extreme right”

Of this elusive defendant, whose chair remained empty in the courtroom, the court will have seen only black and white photos at various ages of his life, comparing them with the composite portraits of the man who had bought the motorcycle used for the attack, drawn by witnesses in 1980.

Passport

Defense and prosecution will have especially battled around another photograph, that of poor quality of the passport of Hassan Diab, at the heart of the accusation. This passport, containing on dates surrounding the attack entry and exit stamps from Spain, the country from which the commando would have left according to information, had been seized in 1981 in Rome from a suspected member of the PFLP-OS . Its existence had only been revealed eighteen years after the fact.

For the National Anti-Terrorist Prosecutor’s Office, this “extremely incriminating element” and the “alibis that don’t hold upof Hassan Diab about his passport have “finished carrying the conviction of his guilt“. The defense replied that “no material element, no evidence“did not allow”to affirm“that the former sociology student was in France at the time of the events. Hassan Diab has always assured that he was then taking his exams at the University of Beirut and could not have used this passport, which he said he had lost.

After interviewing former college comrades and Hassan Diab’s ex-companion, two investigating judges considered “plausible» his presence in Lebanon during the attack and ordered a dismissal in January 2018. Released, he returned to Canada. This decision motivated bydoubts» on his guilt and defended at the bar of the special assize court by two experienced judges, had been reversed three years later by the court of appeal, which had ordered the holding of this trial.

Read also1980 Copernic Street attack: life imprisonment required against the accused Hassan Diab

The hearing will have allowed “free the floorof a handful of the 320 worshipers present in the synagogue when the bomb exploded in the street outside, newly filed as civil parties after four decades of a “forced silence“, had noted a lawyer for victims, Me David Père. They “are not driven by a spirit of revenge and are not particularly looking for a culprit, a head that one would like to carry around on the end of a pike, (…) they want justice to pass“, he assured.