Three policemen in heavy security gear flanked Canadian sociology professor Hassan Diab yesterday, as he appeared in an Ottawa court for the first time in connection with charges linking him to the murderous bombing of a French synagogue 30 years ago.
A publication ban was imposed on yesterday’s bail hearing, which was ultimately postponed until next Thursday. Until then, he will remain in police custody.
The professor at the University of Ottawa and Carleton University is fighting Canada’s effort to extradite him to France, where he faces four murder charges, several counts of attempted murder, and is accused of willful destruction of property by an organized group.
A binder of evidence against Prof. Diab has been sealed from the public. Prof. Diab’s lawyer, René Duval, told reporters he agreed to the delay because he had only just obtained the French case against his client at yesterday’s hearing.
He said Prof. Diab’s defence against Canada’s extradition attempts is simple: They’ve got the wrong guy.
“He was not in Paris at the time in question,” Mr. Duval said following the bail hearing.
He said life has been very hard on his client over the past year, since it first became public that France considers Prof. Diab as a suspect in the bombing. Reports have said the cold case came to life after France obtained new evidence from Germany indicating a Hassan Diab was a member of the group believed to be responsible for the attack that killed three French men and an Israeli woman.
Mr. Duval said his client, who has been living in Gatineau where he was arrested Thursday, has regularly been followed by unknown people and these incidents were reported to the Ottawa police.
“Now I have some inkling as to who was following him. I suspect these were French police officers operating on Canadian territory,” he said.
Prof. Diab argued in an interview published last November in the French newspaper Le Figaro that he has been mistaken for someone else.
“My family name is very common in Lebanon and in the Arab countries,” he said. Those who know the professor say they simply can’t believe Mr. Diab is a terrorist.
Professor John Agnew, who sat on Prof. Diab’s dissertation committee and knew the student at Syracuse University, said Prof. Diab is a Shia Muslim from southern Beirut.
“He always struck me as someone who wasn’t very political,” Prof. Agnew said. “His interests were very sociological.”
He said Prof. Diab married a local woman while in upstate New York, and many of his personal conversations were about problems with his wife’s family - who, Prof. Agnew said, disapproved of the woman marrying a foreigner.
“If this guy was involved in this, he was really deep underground,” Prof. Agnew said with a laugh. Professor Louis Kriesberg, one of Prof. Diab’s supervisors during his time at Syracuse, described him as an energetic, lively scholar, who did not wear his politics on his sleeve.
“He was as apolitical as one could imagine being, coming out of Lebanon,” Prof. Kriesberg said.
In his interview last year with Le Figaro, Prof. Diab said his name has caused him to be detained at airports in the past, only to be told by border officials that they had confused him with someone else.
“I’ve never belonged to any Palestinian organization, nor have I been politically militant,” he said, explaining that he left Lebanon for the United States in the 1980s because he had had enough of war and violence.
