A court in France has sentenced a Canadian academic in absentia to life in prison for a deadly 1980 Paris synagogue bombing.
The court on Friday followed French prosecutors’ request for the highest possible sentence against Diab, now 69 and a resident of Canada’s capital Ottawa.
The decision was met with silence in court. Some of the victims and their families could be seen hugging after a three-week trial in which the suspect’s coffin was left empty.
French authorities accused Diab, who has maintained his innocence for years, of planting explosives on a motorcycle that exploded near a synagogue on Copernic Street in Paris’s 16th arrondissement in the early evening of October 3, 1980.
The blast killed a passing student on a motorbike, a driver, an Israeli journalist and a janitor, while 46 others were injured.
Hassan Diab accused de l’attentat à la bombe de la synagogue de la rue Copernic en France and 1980 attended the jugement du tribunal français in Ottawa.
Il est nerveux mais garde espoir #polcan pic.twitter.com/tQWlKjImFb
— Valerie-Micaela Bain (@ValerieMBain) April 21, 2023
Translation: Hassan Diab, accused of the 1980 Copernic Street synagogue bombing in France, awaits the decision of the French court in Ottawa. He is nervous but hopeful.
Speaking to reporters in Ottawa after the verdict, Diab called his situation “Kafkaian”.
“We hoped that reason would prevail,” he said, as reported by CBC News.
Diab’s lawyers say he was studying for university exams in his native Lebanon at the time of the 1980 attack and is a victim of mistaken identity, a scapegoat for a justice system determined to find a culprit.
His supporters also say the French case relied on classified intelligence and flawed handwriting samples.
“I am here to prevent a miscarriage of justice,” lawyer William Bourdon told the court on Thursday, saying an acquittal was “the only judicial decision possible”.
The head of the Representative Council of French Jewish Institutions (CRIF) welcomed the sentencing on Friday, saying “justice had finally been served” and urging Canada to cooperate with French judicial authorities.
But the sociology professor’s supporters rejected the court’s decision, with former head of Amnesty International Canada Alex Neve calling it “disgraceful”.
“Justice is desperately needed for this bombing 42 years ago; not by scapegoating an innocent person,” Neve wrote on Twitter.
15 years of surreal injustice for Hassan Diab culminate in a disgraceful default judgment. Justice desperately needed for this bombing 42 years ago; not by making an innocent scapegoat. If France requests extradition for the second time, @David Lametti must say no. https://t.co/AWvyJI1UPh
— Alex Neve (@AlexNeve24) April 21, 2023
“The evidence shows that he is innocent and yet they have convicted him,” Diab’s Canadian lawyer, Donald Bayne, said Friday at a meeting in Ottawa, as reported by the Canadian Press news agency.
“It’s a political result. It’s a wrongful conviction,” Bayne said.
In 2014, Canada extradited Diab at the request of French authorities.
However, the investigating judges could not conclusively prove his guilt during the investigation and Diab was released, so that France left for Canada a free man in 2018.
Three years later, a French court overturned this earlier decision and ordered Diab to stand trial on charges of murder, attempted murder and destruction of property in connection with a “terrorist” enterprise.
It remains unclear whether Canada will agree to Diab’s possible extradition, but Canadian human rights lawyers have called on Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government to deny all requests from France.
“Canada must make it absolutely clear that no second request for Dr. Diab will be accepted. There must be no further miscarriage of justice! Hassan Diab’s support committee said in a rack on Friday.
Asked to comment on the French court’s verdict, Trudeau told reporters his government would “look carefully at the next steps, at what the French government decides to do, what the French tribunals decide to do.”
“But we will always be there to stand up for Canadians and their rights,” he said.
Prime Minister in 2018 said “what happened to [Diab] should never have happened”.
“Obviously this is an extremely difficult situation for himself, for his family, which is why we’ve asked for an independent third-party review to look into exactly how this happened and to make sure it never happens again.” Trudeau said at the time.