Forty-three years after the bomb attack on the rue Copernic synagogue in Paris, which killed four people and injured dozens, the sole defendant, the Lebanese-Canadian Hassan Diab, was sentenced on Friday in his absence to life imprisonment.
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After three weeks of debates and nearly eight hours of deliberation, the special assize court in Paris sentenced this 69-year-old academic to the maximum sentence and issued an arrest warrant against him.
“We will carefully consider the next steps of what the French government chooses to do, what the French courts choose to do. But we will always be there to defend Canadians and their rights,” responded Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
“We hoped that reason would prevail,” Hassan Diab told reporters in Ottawa, speaking of a “Kafkaesque” situation.
The verdict was greeted in a great silence in the courtroom where some civil parties had rushed, who demanded that “justice pass” after four decades of waiting.
On October 3, 1980, around 6:35 p.m., the explosion of a bomb planted on a motorcycle near the synagogue on rue Copernic, not far from the avenue des Champs-Élysées, had marked the spirits: it was the first times since the end of the Second World War that the Jewish community of France had been the target of a murderous attack.
During the trial, the prosecution considered that life was the only “conceivable” sentence for Hassan Diab and that he was “without any possible doubt” the author of this never-claimed attack.
The defense had pleaded acquittal, asking the five professional magistrates to “avoid a miscarriage of justice”. “Obtaining an acquittal, since it is one of the most serious attacks, and even if the file is extremely fragile, (…) in this country, it has become mission impossible”, has reacted William Bourdon, Hassan Diab’s lawyer.
The file, one of the longest in French anti-terrorism, is based mainly on intelligence, which attributed the attack in the 1980s to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-Special Operations (FPLP-OS), a splinter group from the PFLP.
After a long suspension of the instruction, new information had designated in 1999 a commando to which Hassan Diab belonged, who would have made the bomb before abandoning it in front of the synagogue.
Of this elusive defendant, the court will only have seen photos at various ages of his life, confronting them with the portraits of the man who had bought the motorcycle used for the attack.
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, 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.
The court considered that this “central piece” proved Hassan Diab’s membership in this organization and that “material elements accredit the information” designating him as the bomber.
She therefore dismissed the “alibis” presented by the Lebanese-Canadian, who has always assured that he was taking exams at the University of Beirut at the time of the attack.
“We cannot be happy that a man is condemned,” Corinne Adler, who was celebrating her bat mitzvah in the synagogue at 13, told AFP when the bomb exploded. “This trial had to take place,” she added, however.
“It’s a real relief, it’s comforting to see that justice has been able to go all the way,” said Patricia Barbé, whose father was killed in the attack.
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 first legal step has been taken, it remains to be seen what will happen tomorrow, will Canada extradite Mr. Diab?” asked a civil party lawyer, Me David Père.
The outcome of any further extradition proceedings is uncertain. The first, which ended after six years, strained diplomatic relations between France and Canada.