43 years ago, Hassan Diab loaded ten kilos of pentrite onto a motorcycle which he parked in front of a synagogue on rue Copernic, in the heart of Paris.
It was he who planted the bomb. Him, responsible for the carnage. Four broken lives. So many others, broken: 46 men, women and children injured, disfigured, traumatized forever.
Hassan Diab was not the commando leader. He was the bomber. The executor of this attack which shook France, on October 3, 1980. It was the first time that an attack targeted the Jewish community of this country since the end of the Second World War.
Justice has therefore decided: Hassan Diab is guilty. Five French magistrates sentenced him to life imprisonment on Friday, after a trial conducted in his absence.
If the defendant’s box was empty, the terrorist lives among us. Warm, in the best-country-in-the-world.
In Ottawa, he has been protected and defended for years by a powerful support committee which presents him as a Canadian Dreyfus, the victim of terrible injustice, incompetence and deceit by the French judicial authorities.
All those who believed in this Kafkaesque fable – and there are many of them – will obviously not be convinced by the verdict of the French judges. They will cry at the rigged trial, as if France were a vulgar banana republic.
They will refuse to see that the Canadian Dreyfus has blood on his hands.
It’s already started. In Ottawa, Hassan Diab, 69, complained about the “Kafkaesque situation” in which he finds himself. “We hoped that reason would prevail,” he sighed. His lawyer, Donald Bayne, denounced a “political result”, an “unjustified condemnation”.
A political result? According to the latest news, France is not Russia. It remains a democracy respecting the principle of the separation of powers.
So why do Hassan Diab’s supporters, including Amnesty International, treat France as if they were dealing with a dark dictatorship?
Before the start of the trial, Amnesty International had urged the public prosecutor to drop the “unfounded” charges against the Lebanese-Canadian. The organization had denounced an “unfair” trial which risked “leading to a new travesty of justice”, nothing less.
French justice did not, however, choose a scapegoat at random. She didn’t wake up one morning saying to herself: for the attack on rue Copernic, why not accuse an ordinary Canadian? Why not this sociology professor from Carleton University?
No, French investigators instead turned every stone to find the bomber. They walked up the trail slowly, patiently.
At the end, there was Hassan Diab.
Over the past few days, the investigators who have searched the file have taken the stand to affirm their certainties: Hassan Diab was indeed the terrorist that France had been looking for for 43 years. There was no possible doubt. No mistake about the person.
The prosecution case relied primarily on intelligence. The evidence was circumstantial: a passport bearing an entry and exit stamp in Europe, a composite portrait, handwriting expertise, the testimony of a former militant of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine – Special Operations (PFLP-OP )…
None of these elements would have been sufficient, on their own, to establish Hassan Diab’s guilt. Together, however, they were all pointing in the same direction. Towards this socio teacher leading an uneventful little life in Ottawa.
This quiet little life, Hassan Diab still leads it, despite the arrest warrant issued by the French justice. And everything suggests that he will lead it for a long time yet.
On Friday, Justin Trudeau would not say how Canada will respond to an inevitable extradition request from France. He said he takes “very seriously the importance of protecting Canadian citizens and respecting all their rights”.
The Prime Minister seems lukewarm to the idea of being firm with a man whose innocence several organizations and Canadian media are passionately claiming.
We will not blame you for perceiving the Hassan Diab case differently, depending on whether you read the French press or the English-Canadian press.
The stubbornness of the investigators in France becomes persecution in Canada. The truth, over there, turns into vindictiveness, on this side of the Atlantic.
We have the impression of being faced with two separate cases. Listen to CBC, and you are moved by this cruel injustice1. You will cry for this ordinary family man, pursued relentlessly by investigators desperate to find a culprit, no matter who.
Read the French press, now, and you will be indignant that a terrorist can escape justice for 43 long years. The approximations and contradictions in the defense of Hassan Diab – especially with regard to this incredible story of a passport allegedly lost just before the attack – will probably convince you of his guilt2.
Beyond perceptions, there are facts.
Facts demonstrated before the Court of Assizes of Paris. Suspected for decades, Hassan Diab has finally been found guilty, at the end of one of the longest judicial investigations carried out in France.
On behalf of his victims and their loved ones, fewer and fewer as the years go by, Canada must now extradite him.