Lawyers fighting the deportation of alleged terrorist Hassan Diab won a potentially crucial round Monday when an Ottawa judge decided to allow the defence to call three handwriting experts.
The experts are expected to testify that pivotal handwriting analysis produced by French authorities as part of their evidence against Diab is deeply flawed.
Federal prosecutors, who have characterized handwriting evidence as “the smoking gun” in the case, had attempted to block the three experts from appearing.
Lebanon-born Diab, 57, is wanted for murder by French authorities for his alleged role in planting a deadly bomb outside a Paris synagogue in 1980. Four people were killed and more than 40 injured in the blast.
Diab says he is the victim of mistaken identity.
Prosecutors had urged Ontario Superior Court Justice Robert Maranger to reject the defence move because under Canada’s laws of extradition, the French evidence had to be presumed reliable unless it could be proved “manifestly unreliable.”
Maranger said he had to hear the defence evidence and cross-examination by prosecutors to determine whether that reliability could be justifiably challenged by Diab and his lawyer Donald Bayne.
This is the third time Bayne has challenged French handwriting evidence. Two earlier applications by Bayne to bring his three experts resulted in the French authorities’ withdrawing the analysis of their two previous handwriting experts.
The third, by analyst Anne Bisotti, will be Bayne’s target when his experts begin appearing early next week.
French handwriting analyst Bisotti compared handwriting in a Paris hotel registry with samples of Diab handwriting from U.S. immigration documents and decided the samples were written by the same person.
But crucially, Bisotti noted seven differences that she attributed to “natural variations” she said can occur in anyone’s signature.
Bayne says evidence from the experts could be enough to eliminate Diab as a suspect. The first handwriting expert will appear Monday and the extradition hearing, which was originally due to end last Friday, could now continue into January.
