On October 3, 1980, four people died and dozens more injured in the attack on a synagogue in the 16th arrondissement of Paris. The only defendant, who has always denied the facts, will not appear in court.
The trial of the attack on the synagogue on rue Copernic, which killed four people and injured dozens on October 3, 1980, opens Monday morning in Paris, 43 years after the events and in the absence of the single accused.
On trial for assassinations, attempted assassinations and aggravated destruction in connection with a terrorist enterprise, Hassan Diab, a 69-year-old Lebanese-Canadian, faces life imprisonment. The former professor of sociology, who has always claimed his innocence, has made it known that he will not come to the hearing and has instructed his lawyers to represent him there.
This academic left free in Canada in January 2018 after having initially benefited from a dismissal in this case, one of the longest in French anti-terrorism.
A suspended trial?
After declaring the proceedings open, the Paris Special Assize Court, which has jurisdiction over terrorism, may technically decide to issue an arrest warrant against the accused, but this would open the way to a new procedure. extradition and would de facto postpone the trial.
The National Anti-Terrorism Prosecutor’s Office and the civil parties should, like the defence, support the holding of a trial in absentia, the first request for Hassan Diab’s extradition having been successful only after six years and had strained diplomatic relations between the France and Canada.
If the absence of the accused “disappoints” the civil parties, they consider it “essential” that the hearing take place after four decades of waiting and judicial reversals, underlines the lawyer of some of them, Me Bernard Cahen. “It’s a good thing that even 43 years later we show that justice is still present,” says Me Cahen, himself involved in the case since its inception.
For the victims, “it’s the end of a very long ordeal,” he adds.
Four dead
On October 3, 1980, around 6:35 p.m., the explosion of the bomb placed on a motorcycle near the synagogue on rue Copernic, in the 16th arrondissement of Paris, killed four people, a student who was passing by on a motorcycle, a private driver , an Israeli journalist and a caretaker, and injured 46 others.
For the first time since the end of the Second World War, the Jewish community of France was the target of a murderous attack. Never claimed, the attack had been attributed to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-Special Operations (FPLP-OS), a dissident group of the PFLP.
The central piece of the prosecution remains the seizure in Rome in 1981 of a passport in the name of Hassan Diab, with entry and exit stamps from Spain, the country from which the commando would have left, on matching dates with the attack. “He was in Lebanon at the time of the events”, taking his exams at the University of Beirut, “we establish it”, retorts one of the defendant’s lawyers, Me William Bourdon. Former students and the ex-wife of Hassan Diab had corroborated his statements, recalls his defense.
The elements of the accusation in dispute
Intelligence also designated Hassan Diab in 1999 as the one who made the explosive device and loaded the motorcycle with the ten kilos of pentrite which exploded in front of the religious building.
In addition to this information, the prosecution points to the resemblance of the former student from Beirut to robot portraits made at the time, the testimony of a couple claiming that he belonged to Palestinian groups in the early 1980s, as well as comparisons between Hassan Diab’s handwriting and that of a hotel form filled out by the man who bought the motorcycle.
These handwriting expertises were fiercely debated during the investigation and should be discussed again at the trial.
“We hear that on the side of the civil parties, there is a claim to have a culprit at all costs, fed by the judicial authority which led them to understand, wrongly, that (…) it was the only ‘guilty’ that we could offer them,” said Me Bourdon.
“This case could have, should have ended at the time of the dismissal order”, an “extremely reasoned” order which had concluded that there was a lack of “sufficiently probative” charges to send Hassan Diab before an assize court, remember his advice. This decision was reversed three years later.
