French justice sentenced Hassan Diab, a 69-year-old Lebanese naturalized Canadian, to life imprisonment for a terrorist attack on a synagogue in Paris in 1980, which killed four people and injured 46.
The court accepted prosecutors’ request to apply the maximum sentence to Hassan Diab, who currently resides in Canada and was not present at the sentencing.
The verdict was received in silence in the courtroom, where there were some of the victims, accompanied by their families, who hugged each other after three weeks of trial, which was not attended by the defendant.
Finally, French prosecutors said there was “no doubt” that Diab, the only suspect, was behind the attack carried out in the early evening of October 3, 1980, when explosives were detonated on a motorcycle near a synagogue on Rue Copernic. , in the 16th arrondissement of Paris, in which a student, who was passing by on a motorcycle at the time, killed a driver, an Israeli journalist and a porter. In addition, 46 people were injured.
This was the first deadly attack on a Jewish target on French soil since World War II. No organization claimed responsibility at the time, but police suspected a splinter group of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.
French intelligence agents accused Diab of being responsible for the 10 kilogram bomb in 1999. That’s because there were physical similarities from Diab to the drawn police sketches, in addition to the fact that handwriting analysis confirmed him as the person who purchased the motorcycle used in the attack.
The investigation turned up another important piece of evidence: a passport in Diab’s name, seized in Rome in 1981, with entry and exit stamps from Spain, where the attack plan had been drawn up.
In 2014, Canada extradited Diab at the request of French authorities. However, the investigating judges were unable to prove his guilt during the investigation and he was eventually released and returned to Canada a free man in 2018.
Three years later, a French court overturned that decision and ordered Diab to stand trial on charges of murder, attempted murder and destruction of property in co-authorship with a terrorist group.
Most of the evidence presented was based on Secret Service sources, with Diab’s lawyers again arguing that the case should be closed. “I’m here to avoid a miscarriage of justice,” the lawyer said, adding that an acquittal was “the only possible decision.”
Diab claimed he was taking exams in Lebanon at the time of the attack, a version corroborated by statements from his former partner and former students.
This conviction means that Hassan Diab will again be subject to a new arrest warrant, which could exacerbate diplomatic tensions between France and Canada after the first extradition took six years.
David Pere, a lawyer for some of the victims of the synagogue attack, said his clients were “neither motivated by revenge nor looking for the head of a guilty person to be put on a stake”.
It is recalled that Diab received some support from NGOs, including Amnesty International, who took credibility to his claim that he was in Lebanon at the time of the attack.
Source: DN
