PARIS: A Paris court on Friday sentenced Lebanese-Canadian citizen Hassan Diab to life in prison in absentia for the 1980 bombing of a synagogue in which four people died.
The court followed prosecutors’ request for the maximum possible punishment against Diab, now 69 and a university professor in Canada.
Prosecutors had said in their summing-up that there was “no possible doubt” that Diab, the only suspect, was behind the attack.
In the early evening of October 3, 1980, explosives placed on a motorcycle detonated close to a synagogue in Rue Copernic in Paris’s chic 16th district, killing a student passing by on a motorbike, a driver, an Israeli journalist and a caretaker.
Forty-six were injured in the blast.
The bombing was the first deadly attack against a Jewish target on French soil since World War II.
No organization ever claimed responsibility but police suspected a splinter group of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.
French intelligence in 1999 accused Diab, a sociology professor, of having made the 10-kilogramme (22-pound) bomb.
They pointed to Diab’s likeness with police sketches drawn at the time and handwriting analyzes that they said confirmed him as a suspect.
They also produced a key item of evidence against him — a passport in his name, seized in Rome in 1981, with entry and exit stamps from Spain, where the attack plan was believed to have originated.
In 2014, Canada extradited Diab at the request of the French authorities.
However, investigating judges were unable to prove his guilt conclusively during the investigation and Diab was released, leaving France for Canada a free man in 2018.
Three years later, a French court overturned the earlier decision and ordered that Diab should stand trial after all, on charges of murder, attempted murder and destruction of property in connection with a terrorist enterprise.
French authorities stopped short of issuing a new international arrest warrant for Diab, effectively leaving it up to him to attend his trial or not.
His conviction means Diab is now again the subject of an arrest warrant, which risks stoking diplomatic tensions between France and Canada after his first extradition took six years.
David Pere, a lawyer for some of the Jewish worshippers present in the synagogue at the time of the bombing, said his clients were “not motivated by vengence nor looking for a guilty person’s head to stick on a pike... they want justice to be done.”
Paris court gives man life term for 1980 synagogue bombing
https://arab.news/p39xk
Paris court gives man life term for 1980 synagogue bombing
- The court followed prosecutors' request for the maximum possible punishment against Diab, now 69 and a university professor in Canada
- Prosecutors had said in their summing-up that there was "no possible doubt" that Diab, the only suspect, was behind the attack
Carney says Canada has no plans to pursue free trade agreement with China as Trump threatens tariffs
Carney says Canada has no plans to pursue free trade agreement with China as Trump threatens tariffs
TORONTO: Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney said Sunday his country has no intention of pursuing a free trade deal with China. He was responding to US President Donald Trump’s threat to impose a 100 percent tariff on goods imported from Canada if America’s northern neighbor went ahead with a trade deal with Beijing.
Carney said his recent agreement with China merely cuts tariffs on a few sectors that were recently hit with tariffs.
Trump claims otherwise, posting that “China is successfully and completely taking over the once Great Country of Canada. So sad to see it happen. I only hope they leave Ice Hockey alone! President DJT”
The prime minister said under the free trade agreement with the US and Mexico there are commitments not to pursue free trade agreements with nonmarket economies without prior notification.
“We have no intention of doing that with China or any other nonmarket economy,” Carney said. “What we have done with China is to rectify some issues that developed in the last couple of years.”
In 2024, Canada mirrored the United States by putting a 100 percent tariff on electric vehicles from Beijing and a 25 percent tariff on steel and aluminum. China had responded by imposing 100 percent import taxes on Canadian canola oil and meal and 25 percent on pork and seafood.
Breaking with the United States this month during a visit to China, Carney cut its 100 percent tariff on Chinese electric cars in return for lower tariffs on those Canadian products.
Carney has said there would be an initial annual cap of 49,000 vehicles on Chinese EV exports coming into Canada at a tariff rate of 6.1 percent, growing to about 70,000 over five years. He noted there was no cap before 2024. He also has said the initial cap on Chinese EV imports was about 3 percent of the 1.8 million vehicles sold in Canada annually and that, in exchange, China is expected to begin investing in the Canadian auto industry within three years.
Trump posted a video Sunday in which the chief executive of the Canadian Vehicle Manufacturers’ Association warns there will be no Canadian auto industry without US access, while noting the Canadian market alone is too small to justify large scale manufacturing from China.
“A MUST WATCH. Canada is systematically destroying itself. The China deal is a disaster for them. Will go down as one of the worst deals, of any kind, in history. All their businesses are moving to the USA. I want to see Canada SURVIVE AND THRIVE! President DJT,” Trump posted on social media.
Trump’s post on Saturday said that if Carney “thinks he is going to make Canada a ‘Drop Off Port’ for China to send goods and products into the United States, he is sorely mistaken.”
“We can’t let Canada become an opening that the Chinese pour their cheap goods into the U.S,” US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said on ABC’s “This Week.”
“We have a , but based off — based on that, which is going to be renegotiated this summer, and I’m not sure what Prime Minister Carney is doing here, other than trying to virtue-signal to his globalist friends at Davos.”
Trump’s threat came amid an escalating war of words with Carney as the Republican president’s push to acquire Greenland strained the NATO alliance.
Carney has emerged as a leader of a movement for countries to find ways to link up and counter the US under Trump. Speaking in Davos before Trump, Carney said, “Middle powers must act together because if you are not at the table, you are on the menu” and he warned about coercion by great powers — without mentioning Trump’s name. The prime minister received widespread praise and attention for his remarks, upstaging Trump at the World Economic Forum.
Trump’s push to acquire Greenland has come after he has repeatedly needled Canada over its sovereignty and suggested it also be absorbed into the United States as a 51st state. He posted an altered image on social media this week showing a map of the United States that included Canada, Venezuela, Greenland and Cuba as part of its territory.
