More than 42 years after a deadly explosion at a Paris synagogue, a court in the French capital on Friday sentenced a Lebanese-born Canadian university professor to life in prison for the attack. The judges decided that Hasan Diab, who is now 69 years old, was the young man who set a motorcycle trap on the rue Copernicus in Paris on October 3, 1980, News.ro reported with reference to BBC News.

Four people died and another 38 were injured in the attack, which took place more than 42 years ago. The rue Copernicus bombing was the first attack on Jews in France since World War II and became the model for many other similar attacks carried out by Middle Eastern militants in the following years. The decades-long investigation has become synonymous with both prolonged judicial confusion and the persistence of several magistrates to keep the case from being forgotten.

Canadian media reported that Professor Hassan Diab, who refused to attend the hearing, said it was “like Kafka”. However, prosecutors argued that “beyond any possible doubt” he was the author of the attack in October 1980. Supporters of Hassan Diab condemned the trial as “manifestly unfair”.

A court case with many vicissitudes

Hassan Diab is a Lebanese of Palestinian descent who became a Canadian citizen in 1993 and teaches sociology in Ottawa.

He was first named as a suspect in the case in 1999 based on new evidence, nearly 20 years after the murders.

Eight years later, the French issued an international arrest warrant and only in 2014 did Canada agree to extradite him.

But in 2018, French magistrates declared the case closed due to a lack of evidence, allowing Diab to return to Canada.

Finally, in 2021, an appeal to dismiss the case was allowed to the Supreme Court, the first time this had happened in a French terrorism case. That meant the trial could finally take place, and it began earlier this month.

From the beginning, Hassan Diab has maintained his innocence and did not return to France for the trial, which took place in his absence.

Hassan Diab with his supporters demanding that he not be extradited (Photo: Adrian Wyld / Zuma Press / Profimedia)

What’s next?

His conviction means he will have to make a second extradition request, although there are serious doubts about his success.

“I was hoping that reason would prevail,” Diab said Friday, according to the Canadian Press news agency.

In response to the verdict, the Hassan Diab Support Committee of Canada called on Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to make it “absolutely clear” that a second extradition will not be accepted. Supporters said the 15-year “legal nightmare has fully exposed the enormous cruelty and injustice”.

At a press conference, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said his government would “carefully consider the next steps, what the French government decides to do, what the French courts decide to do.”

“But we will always be there to protect Canadians and their rights,” he added.

How did the new process go?

For three weeks, the court heard a presentation of the known facts of the case, as well as arguments that identified Hassan Diab as the perpetrator of the attack and counter-evidence that he was the victim of mistaken identity.

In 1980, the police released a robot portrait of a terrorist.

None of the original investigation team is alive to speak, and surviving eyewitnesses who saw the attacker in 1980 admitted that more than 40 years later their memories were too blurry to be trusted.

What happened in 1980?

The bomb was left in the hood of a Suzuki motorcycle in front of a synagogue in the affluent 16th arrondissement of Paris. If there had been no delay, the sidewalk would have been filled with people who had left the service inside.

In 1980, the investigation initially focused on neo-Nazis, and the political left organized mass demonstrations. But the claim of the far-right group turned out to be false, and by the end of the year, attention turned to the connection with the Middle East.

It was established that the perpetrator of the explosion had a fake Cypriot passport in the name of Oleksandr Panadria. He is believed to have entered France from another European country as part of a larger group and bought a motorbike from a shop near the Arc de Triomphe.

How did you get to Hassan Diab?

He was suspected of belonging to a dissident Palestinian group called the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine – Special Operations (PFLP-SO). But the investigation hit a wall, and it was not until 1999 that Hassan Diab’s name surfaced following new information believed to have come from the former Soviet bloc.

Italian authorities then discovered that in 1981 Hassan Diab’s passport had been found at Rome airport in the possession of a high-ranking FPLP-SO figure. The passport had stamps indicating that the owner had entered and left Spain around the day of the Copernicus Street attack.

The central element of the prosecution was the passport.

During interrogation in custody, Diab explained that he lost his passport literally a month before the attack. But in Lebanon, a French judge found an official declaration of the lost passport – a declaration made in 1983 with the date of loss in April 1981.

The defense argued that all these data were circumstantial and that there is still no concrete evidence that Diab was in France in October 1980. They presented testimony from friends in Beirut who said Diab was taking university exams at the time of the attack.

Graphologists who claimed that a hotel check-in form signed by the attacker matched Diab’s handwriting were also dismissed as inconclusive witnesses.

“The only legally possible solution — even if it’s humanly difficult — is an acquittal,” defense attorney William Burdon said Thursday. “I am in front of you to prevent a miscarriage of justice,” he said.

But prosecutor Benjamin Chambre, regretting that all the other members of the terror group escaped without being charged, said: “Hassan Diab has the one who made the bomb and the one who planted the bomb. This is already something.”