PARIS: A Canadian academic was charged on Saturday over the deadly 1980 bombing of a Paris synagogue after losing his six-year legal battle against extradition over the notorious attack.
Hassan Diab, a Canadian of Lebanese descent, appeared before a French anti-terror judge just hours after arriving in Paris from Montreal.
He was charged for suspected involvement in "murders", "attempted murders" and the "destruction of property with an explosive or incendiary substance, committed by an organised gang", Diab's French lawyer Stephane Bonifassi told AFP.
The October 3, 1980, bombing of a synagogue on rue Copernic in Paris killed four people and left around 40 others injured. It marked the first fatal attack against the French Jewish community since the Nazi occupation in World War II.
The 60-year-old professor of sociology at Ottawa University had been fighting his extradition to avoid what he said would be an unfair prosecution in France for a crime he insists he did not commit. If convicted, he could face up to life in prison.
"My client maintains his innocence," Bonifassi said. "We will continue the fight started in Canada so that his innocence is established."
Diab then appeared before another French judge who ordered that he be remanded in custody, a judicial source said.
His extradition came after Canada's supreme court refused on Thursday to hear his final plea to halt the procedure.
Diab was arrested at his home in an Ottawa suburb in November 2008 at the request of French authorities who alleged he was a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.
The extremist group pioneered armed jetliner hijackings in the 1960s and was believed to be behind a string of deadly attacks in Europe, including the Paris bombing.
Canada's justice minister signed an order in April 2012 to send Diab to France after a Canadian court approved his extradition, despite its concerns that the French case was "weak".
Diab has said he has "absolutely no connection whatsoever to the terrible 1980 attack," while his legal team argued he should not be extradited because a conviction in Canada would be unlikely.
The French Jewish community expressed "great relief" at Diab's arrest and extradition.
"It has a very strong symbolic value because it was the first terrorist act against Jews" since the end of World War II, said Roger Cukierman, head of the Council of Jewish Institutions in France (CRIF).
"The fact that this act had gone unpunished was very distressing," he added.
The attack on the synagogue happened on a Friday evening, the eve of the Jewish sabbath when it was packed with some 300 worshippers.
Ten kilogrammes of explosives hidden in the saddlebags of a parked motorcycle were detonated and the ensuing blast killed three Frenchmen and a young Israeli woman.
Police first focused on the far right as possible perpetrators of the bombing before turning their attention to extremist groups in the Middle East, but made no headway in the case for years.
The probe was relaunched in October 2007 to gain information from the United States on Diab, who had spent several years in the country.
Diab became a Canadian citizen in 2006 and is now the father of a nearly two-year-old girl with his common-law wife.
He has claimed that he was studying in Beirut at the time of the bombing and has said that he had been confused with someone with the same name.
Diab's lawyers in Canada have mainly sought to discredit what they called "fatally flawed" handwriting analysis of a Paris hotel slip that French authorities say was signed in the same false identity that was also presented to purchase the motorcycle used in the bombing.
Diab's lawyers have said that the fingerprint evidence does not match Diab's and that the person who signed the hotel slip was described by witnesses as being middle-aged, whereas Diab would have been 26 at the time.
Canadian charged over 1980 Paris synagogue bombing
Canadian charged over 1980 Paris synagogue bombing
Top entertainment figures back under-fire UN Palestinians expert
PARIS: Over a hundred top figures from the world of entertainment signed an open letter Saturday in support of UN Palestinian human rights expert Francesca Albanese who faces calls to resign over comments about the war in Gaza.
France and Germany have called for Albanese to step down over remarks last weekend in which she referred to a “common enemy of humanity” after criticizing “most of the world” and the media for enabling Israel’s “genocide” in Gaza.
Critics and Israel have accused the UN Special Rapporteur of referring to Israel as a “common enemy,” while Albanese has denounced this as a “manipulation” and “completely false.”
In a letter organized by the Artists for Palestine group and shared with AFP, over a 100 cultural figures backed her, including actors Mark Ruffalo and Javier Bardem, Nobel-winning author Annie Ernaux and British musician Annie Lennox.
The signatories “offer our full support to Francesca Albanese, a defender of human rights and therefore also of the Palestinian people’s right to exist,” the letter says.
“There are infinitely more of us, in every corner of the Earth, who want force no longer to be the law. Who know what the word ‘law’ truly means,” it concludes.
Published in French on the website of Artists for Palestine, it also reproduces the full remarks by Albanese who was speaking via videoconference at a forum last Saturday organized by the Al Jazeera TV network.
Other celebrities to offer support for her include actresses Rosa Salazar and Asia Argento, Oscar-nominated film directors Yorgos Lanthimos and Kaouther Ben Hania, Latin music star Residente, and photographer Nan Goldin.
A group of French MPs sent a letter to French Foreign Minister Jean-Noel Barrot on Tuesday denouncing Albanese’s remarks as “antisemitic.”
Barrot called for her to step down a day later, saying that France “unreservedly condemns the outrageous and reprehensible remarks.”
German Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul on Thursday said her position was “untenable.”
‘Shame of our time’
Albanese is one of the most outspoken critics of Israel’s more-than-two-year bombardment of Gaza which has resulted in the deaths of over 70,000 people and the destruction of most of the territory’s infrastructure.
She has called it the “the shame of our time” and says she always asks prime ministers, presidents and foreign ministers the same question: “How do you sleep? When will you act?“
The Italian-born legal expert, who began her unpaid role in 2022, was targeted with sanctions by the Trump administration in July last year over what it called her “biased and malicious” work.
UN special rapporteurs like Albanese are independent experts who are appointed by the UN rights council, but do not speak on behalf of the United Nations.
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres distanced himself from Albanese on Thursday when his spokesman said “we don’t agree with much of what she says.”
“We wouldn’t use the language that she’s using in describing the situation,” his spokesman Stephane Dujarric added.
The Gaza war was sparked by Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attack on Israel, which resulted in the deaths of 1,221 people.
On that day, militants abducted 251 people into Gaza.
The open letter and signatories can be seen here.
