On October 3, 1980, Gilles-William Goldnadel was at 26 avenue Kléber when, around 6:40 p.m., he heard a huge explosion. The young lawyer and his colleague, Aude Weill-Raynal, immediately rushed 100 meters away where they discovered a real scene of war. In front of the synagogue on Avenue Copernic, “it was horror. We were in the middle of bloodied corpses and injured people with their faces torn off”. This first anti-Semitic attack committed in France since the end of the Second World War left 4 dead and 46 injured. But he could have made hundreds since in the synagogue, a religious ceremony bringing together 300 faithful was about to end.
Forty-three years later, it is therefore no coincidence that these two lawyers found themselves on the side of the civil parties in the trial which, on April 21, declared the Lebanese-Canadian and former professor of sociology at the University of Ottawa Hassan Diab guilty of this attack. Despite his refusal to participate in the trial, the judges of the Special Assize Court of Paris sentenced him to life imprisonment after three weeks of hearings and eight hours of deliberation.
“The Canadian government would dishonor itself if it did not extradite Hassan Diab, maintains Gilles-William Goldnadel. Mr. Diab was sentenced by a court that is internationally considered serious and fair. There are two-way extradition conventions between Canada and France. You will have to explain to me why Canada would not extradite Mr. Diab. There is no reason for this. »
However, nothing seems obvious at the moment. “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,” Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said after the trial.
Hassan Diab still maintains his innocence. “We hoped that reason would prevail,” he declared to the press in Ottawa on April 21, speaking of a “Kafkaesque” situation.
The Palestinian trail
Because, nothing is simple in this legal saga which stretches over more than four decades. While the police will quickly learn that the motorcycle bomb that caused the explosion had been purchased by a man who had resided at the Celtic Hotel and who introduced himself as a Cypriot national named Alexander Panadriyu, the same is not true for the following. While the day after the tragedy 200,000 people took to the streets to denounce an anti-Semitic attack, French justice lost precious time before deciding to follow the Palestinian lead.
It will be necessary to wait until 1999 for suspicion to fall on Hassan Diab and for the Directorate of Territorial Security (DST) to affirm that he had been part of a commando arrived from Spain shortly before the attack. We then learn that in October 1981, a member of the Front for the Liberation of Palestine – Special Operations (PFLP-OS) – a dissident Palestinian terrorist organization, was arrested at Rome airport with in his possession the Lebanese passport of Hassan Diab. A passport that he will claim to have lost by chance on a Lebanese road. Not only does the photo look like the composite portrait of Panadriyu, but the stamps indicate that Diab would have joined Spain shortly before the attack and would have left shortly after. So it would be the same person.
In 2008, an arrest warrant was issued by anti-terrorism judge Marc Trévidic. At that time, Diab had already reached the United States, where he continued his studies at Syracuse University, before settling in Canada in 1987. It was not until 2014 that Diab was extradited to France. It is here that French justice will do an about-face. While Judge Trévidic was transferred and Diab had been detained for three years, in 2018, the two new judges responsible for the case pronounced, to everyone’s surprise, a dismissal. According to his defenders, this dismissal reveals the fragility of the evidence against Diab. As soon as he was released, he returned to Canada accompanied by an emissary from the Canadian Embassy. “What happened to Hassan Diab should never have happened,” Justin Trudeau said in June 2018 before promising he would make sure “it never happens again.”
“Overwhelming Evidence”
It will be necessary to wait until 2021 for the Investigating Chamber of the Paris Court of Appeal to finally invalidate this dismissal and demand a trial. If Gilles-William Goldnadel does not explain this dismissal other than by “ideological reasons”: he considers that the evidence of Diab’s guilt is numerous. “There are not only concordant handwriting analyses,” he says. There’s Diab’s acknowledgment from the employee who sold the bombing motorcycle. There’s Diab’s passport found where it shouldn’t be. This is overwhelming evidence. Especially since his defense was at the very least confused about his presence in Lebanon at that time since he cited two different dates. As for his famous witnesses, it took almost 40 years for so-called university comrades to remember providentially that he was in the same amphitheater as them when he took an exam on the date of the attack. But who are we kidding? »
In 2017, lawyer Donald Bayne did not hesitate to compare his client’s trial to… the Dreyfus affair! According to the defense, the indictment is not based on any material evidence showing that Diab was indeed in France at the time of the attack. This is also the opinion of judge Jean-Marc Herbaut, who had pronounced the case dismissed (with his colleague Richard Foltzer) and who came to testify at the trial. According to him, the handwriting expertise is no more credible than Diab’s resemblance to a composite portrait. Only the passport he claims to have lost poses a problem for him, but it could have been used by a third party, said the judge, who does not exclude instrumentalization by the Israeli secret services. “There are elements against Hassan Diab, but too tenuous and counterbalanced by others,” he said.
These exculpatory explanations obviously did not convince the court for whom the passport constitutes a “central piece”, and Diab’s alibis remain “little credible”. “I see that French justice has been so fair to Mr. Diab that he received a totally unexpected dismissal,” said Mr. Goldnadel. He was represented by a lawyer who, at no time, rebelled against the way in which French justice acted with regard to the accused. He himself didn’t think he had to come, for reasons we can perfectly understand. But, in principle, when you are innocent, you want to go and explain yourself to justice that is considered fair. »
When is the extradition?
The French government has yet to formally seek Hassan Diab’s extradition when its influential backers — including Amnesty International and NDP justice and international affairs critics Randall Garrison and Heather McPherson — are pressing the Canadian government to refuse. In theory, the extradition treaties signed by France and Canada only allow the respective courts of the two countries to suspend an extradition request if this request is deemed “manifestly unfounded”. After a judge has ruled, the final decision rests with the Minister of Justice. Since Diab’s extradition in 2014, lawyers have been calling for a reform of the procedures to make them more binding. The main interested party is claiming $ 90 million from Canada for having extradited him for the first time in 2014.
In Canada, the Center for Israel and Jewish Affairs called on the Canadian government to respect the French courts’ decision. Recently, the daily The world believed that there was “very little chance” that an extradition request would be carried out in Canada “given the diplomatic tensions that this case has already caused between Paris and Ottawa and because of the strength of the current of support for Mr Diab.
For Gilles-William Goldnadel, “if Canada refuses extradition, that means that not only is it failing in its duty on the extradition law, but that, on the other hand, it considers French justice as a justice of junk. In this case, I ask French justice to take the necessary retaliatory measures to no longer extradite to Canada. The principle of reciprocity also exists in this matter. »