Nearly 43 years after the attack on the synagogue on rue Copernic in Paris, life imprisonment was requested Thursday in France by the national anti-terrorist prosecution against the only defendant, the Lebanese-Canadian Hassan Diab, tried in his absence.
Advocates General Benjamin Chambre and Olivier Dabin had started their indictment in two voices by expressing their “intimate conviction” of the guilt of this 69-year-old academic.
They finished it five hours later before the special assize court in Paris, vilifying the “cowardice” of Hassan Diab, who “forced them to request the heaviest sentence”, life imprisonment with a warrant of judgment “in order to ensure (its) effectiveness”.
Hassan Diab, who has always claimed his innocence, returned free to Canada in January 2018 after having initially benefited from a dismissal in this case, one of the longest in French anti-terrorism.
This decision was overturned three years later by the Court of Appeal, which referred the former sociology professor to the special assize court for murder, attempted murder and aggravated destruction in connection with a terrorist enterprise.
Cited as a witness at trial, the examining magistrate Jean-Marc Herbaut explained to the bar the “doubts” and the “uncertainties” which had led him to take this decision to dismiss the case.
“Without any possible doubt”, Hassan Diab “is indeed” the author of this “heinous attack”, retorted the representatives of the anti-terrorist prosecution.
Assuring that there was “no material element”, “no proof” of the presence of Hassan Diab in France during the attack, the defense pleaded acquittal, “the only legally possible decision even if it is humanly difficult,” according to his lawyer.
“I am here before you to avoid a miscarriage of justice,” said William Bourdon at the special assize court.
On October 3, 1980, around 6.35 p.m., the explosion of the bomb planted on a motorcycle near the synagogue on rue Copernic killed four people – a student who was passing by on a motorcycle, a private driver, an Israeli journalist on vacation and a neighbor — and injured 46.
The deadly attack, which for the first time targeted the Jewish community in France since the country’s liberation from Nazi rule, was attributed by investigators to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-Special Operations (PFLP-OS), a dissident group of the PFLP.
“Stubbornness”
The instruction, put several times in long sleep, had “started from zero” after information designating in 1999 Hassan Diab as the one who made and planted the bomb in front of the synagogue, recalled Olivier Dabin.
His colleague Benjamin Chambre praised before him “the stubbornness” of magistrates and investigators making it possible to hold this trial, “even more than 42 years later”.
The “old-fashioned investigation”, without telephony or DNA, had begun thanks to the “motorcycle carcass” of the bomber near the synagogue, which had made it possible to go back to its buyer, a man presenting himself under the false Cypriot identity of Alexander Panadriyu, who also left five words on a hotel card.
For the prosecution, this Panadriyu and Hassan Diab are one, because of the “similarities” between his photos and the sketches of the suspect drawn at the time and four handwriting expertise not excluding that he or “the writer” of the form.
But the most “incriminating” element is the discovery a posteriori by counter-terrorism, nineteen years after the events, of the seizure in Rome in 1981 from a presumed member of the PFLP-OS of the Lebanese passport of Hassan Diab.
This passport included an entry stamp on September 20, 1980 in Spain, the country from which the Copernic Street commando would have left, and an exit stamp from the same country seventeen days later.
Hassan Diab has always claimed to have lost this passport and that he could not be in Paris or Spain at the time of the events since he was taking his exams at the University of Beirut.
His version had been corroborated by former students and his ex-partner, “credible” testimonies for the two investigating judges who had ordered the dismissal.
The Advocates General swept them away, considering that these examinations, the dates of which could not be specified, “do not constitute an alibi for Hassan Diab”.
The verdict is expected Friday at the end of the day.