Perpetuity or acquittal? Forty-three years after the attack on the synagogue on rue Copernic in Paris, the special assize court delivers its verdict on Friday with regard to the only defendant tried in his absence, the Lebanese-Canadian Hassan Diab who protests of his innocence.
Shortly after the resumption of the hearing on Friday morning, and for lack of last words from the 69-year-old accused, the five professional magistrates composing the court will leave almost immediately for deliberation, scheduled to last all day.
They will have to decide according to their “intimate conviction” in favor of the guilt or innocence of Hassan Diab, the only person implicated in the bomb attack that targeted the synagogue on rue Copernic, killing four and dozens. injured on October 3, 1980.
Unsurprisingly after three weeks of antagonistic and often lively debates, the National Anti-Terrorism Prosecutor’s Office on Thursday demanded life imprisonment against Hassan Diab, and the defense his acquittal in order to “avoid a miscarriage of justice”.
The dossier is mainly based on intelligence, which attributed the attack in the 1980s – which was not claimed – to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-Special Operations (PFLP-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.
Of this elusive defendant, the court will only have seen black and white photos at various ages of his life, comparing them with the robot 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 not been revealed until 18 years after the fact.
For the National Anti-Terrorist Prosecutor’s Office, this “extremely incriminating element” and Hassan Diab’s “alibis that do not hold” about his passport have “finished convincing him of his guilt”.
The defense replies that “no material element, no proof” allows “to affirm” that he was in France at the time of the facts.
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 hearing former college comrades and Hassan Diab’s ex-girlfriend, two investigating judges considered his presence in Lebanon during the attack “likely” and ordered a dismissal in January 2018. Released, he returned to Canada.
This decision motivated by “doubts” about his guilt was overturned three years later by the Court of Appeal, which ordered the holding of this trial.
This will have made it possible to “free the floor” of a handful of the 320 people present in the synagogue when the bomb exploded in the street, newly constituted civil parties after four decades of “forced silence”, noted a lawyer. of victims, Me David Father.
They “are not driven by a spirit of revenge and do not particularly seek a culprit, a head that one would like to carry around on the end of a pike, […] they want justice to pass, ”he said.
If the court convicted Hassan Diab, it would issue an arrest warrant against him. The outcome of a possible new extradition procedure is uncertain, the first, which was completed after six years, having strained diplomatic relations between France and Canada.