The French government’s case that Ottawa university professor Hassan Naim Diab bombed a Paris synagogue in 1980 relies on extensive help from intelligence services to link him to the trail that petered out on police in the 1980s.
Diab was arrested in Hull, Que., last week at the request of French authorities, who say he was responsible for parking a bomb-laden motorcycle outside a synagogue in Paris on Oct. 3, 1980. The bomb detonated before worshippers left services inside, but it still killed three French men and an Israeli woman.
The French government wants Diab to face charges of murder, attempted murder, and wilful destruction of property, contending the Lebanese-born Canadian carried out the bombing for a radical leftist group called the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, Special Operations.
Diab has denied the allegations through his lawyer, who says he wasn’t even in France at the time.
The French case against Diab was in a file sealed from public view, but on Thursday it was opened by order of a Canadian judge.
The French case against Diab has four main points:
- He resembles police sketches of the bomber;
- His handwriting matches that of the bomber;
- He is identified by intelligence sources and former friends as having been a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine; and
- His passport was used to get into France around the time of the 1980 bombing, in suspicious circumstances.
The declaration outlining the case begins by tracing the movements of the synagogue bomber back from the scene of the crime. Police worked back to the dealer who sold the Suzuki motorcycle whose saddlebags would contain the explosives, to the Hotel Celtic where he stayed in Paris, and the prostitute who visited him there.
He was staying under the name Alexander Panadriyu, but police eventually concluded that was a false identity from a fake Cypriot passport.
As they closed in, decades after the bombing, French police say they had two experts compare the writing on “Panadriyu’s” check-in file with a sample of Diab’s handwriting, gleaned from documents when he was a student at Syracuse University years later.
One expert said the writing was definitely Diab’s, though he had tried to change it; the other expert said Diab could have been the writer.
Further, French authorities argue, police sketches produced at the time -- based on interviews with witnesses to the attack, merchants who sold goods used in the attack, and those who dealt with a man using the Panadriyu passport in Paris around the time of the attack -- all resemble Diab.
One man French police identified as a close university friend of Diab’s, who was himself an ex-member of the PFLP, Youcef El Khalil, would later tell them he thought the sketches resembled Diab when they were published in the Paris-Match newspaper on Oct. 24, 1980.
They looked like his friend so much, the French police say, that El Khalil felt compelled to talk about the attack with Diab when they met that year in Beirut, discussing how such bomb attacks hurt their cause and portrayed the PFLP poorly in the media.
The French authorities also suggest Diab not only committed the Paris bombing, but was also responsible for a second bombing on Oct. 20, 1981, of a synagogue in Antwerp, Belgium.
The hearing continues today.
