France wants Canada to extradite 56-year-old former University of Ottawa professor Hassan Diab, who they allege was involved in a terrorist bomb plot that killed four people and injured more than 40 others outside the Copernic synagogue in Paris on Oct. 3, 1980. The extradition hearing, preceded by a defence motion that the case be dropped, begins today.
In this third and final piece from Paris, Citizen senior writer Chris Cobb looks at the investigation that led French authorities to Ottawa.
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PARIS -- It was 28 years before the police came to the Copernic synagogue to ask about the bombing.
“Why did you wait until 2009?” Rabbi Michael Williams asked the officers. “Why didn’t you come in 1980 or 1981?”
“Well, now we have a suspect,” said one of the officers.
After initially, and wrongly, suspecting neo-Nazis of planting the Copernic bomb, Paris police turned their attention to extremist Palestinian groups.
Police soon found the terrorists’ abandoned getaway car, a Citroën littered with cigarette butts and takeout food wrappings. Their greatest mistake, in hindsight, was tossing out the garbage, cleaning the car and returning it to the rental agency.
Today, even a smidgen of DNA from the getaway car would be enough to clear or implicate one or more of the five suspects.
The trail was already cooling fast as police gathered evidence.
One of the suspects, allegedly traveling on a Cypriot passport, stayed at the Celtic Hotel close to the synagogue where he signed the register with the false Greek name Alexander Panadryiu — the same name used to buy the Suzuki motorcycle that carried the bomb.
Another false name, Joseph Matthias, was used to rent the car.
French police allege that Panadryiu and Matthias are the same man: Hassan Diab who, they claim, used his real passport to get from Lebanon and into Spain on Sept. 20, 1980 and back again four days after the bombing.
The police also produced sketches of the man who parked the Suzuki on the Copernic sidewalk and say they match perfectly the face in the passports. The sketches were based on descriptions from local storekeepers and from a prostitute who the alleged bomber paid $100 for a night at the hotel.
With the terrorists long gone from France and likely dispersed, the investigation reached a dead end. But it was never officially closed.
Diab is in his current legal predicament because of the dogged work of terrorism specialist Marc Trévidic, a 45-year-old French examining magistrate. Trévidic’s dedication to his cause has been compared in the French press to Pierre Michel, the legendary French judge who became the scourge of the Marseilles drug trade and was gunned down in 1981 by the “French Connection.”
Trévidic investigated the shooting down in 1994 of the plane carrying Rwandan president Juvenal Habyarimana, whose death triggered the genocide in which more than 800,000 Rwandan, mostly Tutsi, were killed.
Trévidic, who had a legal claim on the case because the flight crew was French, succeeded in convincing Rwandan authorities to arrest and extradite more than a half dozen senior officials, including one government minister.
Trévidic’s interest in the Copernic case was apparently spurred by information unearthed in police files of the former East Germany.
His hands-on approach to investigation is articulated, according to French newspaper Le Monde, by a sign in his office: “Assis, debout, mais pas couché” (“Sitting, standing, but not lying down”).
“When I take on a case,” he said, “I reread everything from A to Z and create spreadsheets to capture any existing paths and any that may not have been uncovered.”
One uncovered path led him to Lebanon, where he apparently found and interviewed Diab’s father, sister and friends from his youth.
According to lawyer Bernard Cahen, Diab’s friends said they were all members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, which was not illegal.
French police allege that the PFLP, or an offshoot, was responsible for the Copernic attack.
Under Trévidic’s direction, French police also tapped conversations between Diab and his Scottish girlfriend.
Police took samples of Diab’s handwriting from Syracuse University, where he studied, and compared it to the hotel registry signed in 1980. This handwriting analysis will be pivotal in Diab’s extradition case.
Another Copernic suspect Trévidic is pursuing is thought to be in the United States, but the French are reluctant to discuss that investigation.
Diab has not spoken to Canadian media, but in October 2007 he was approached at the University of Ottawa by Jean Chichizola, a reporter for the French daily Le Figaro who had received a tip that Diab was a suspect.
Chichizola, who subsequently wrote a book about the Copernic case, flew to Ottawa with the sole purpose of questioning Diab and sat in on a class where Diab was lecturing on Marxism and feminism.
The reporter described Diab as being pleasant and open about his links to Lebanon and an academic career that took him back home, to the American University in Beirut, in the 1990s.
When Chichizola asked a few personal questions, he refused to answer and said he was unaware that he was a suspect in the Copernic attack.
Diab said if he, or someone with his name, was a suspect, it was mistaken identity.
“My family name is very common … when I worked at the American University of Beirut, we were no less than four Diabs.”
He told the reporter he was born in Beirut in 1953 but had never belonged to a Palestinian organization such as the PFLP.
“I studied sociology there and that is all I did. I then left Lebanon for the U.S. in the 1980s because I had had enough of war and violence. I earned a doctorate at the University of Syracuse in New York State.”
He said he would be prepared to answer questions about his alleged involvement in the Paris bombing if French authorities wanted to question him but complained that since 9/11 the “cases are built out of nothing, especially if you’re a minority.”
(Diab’s lawyer Donald Bayne refused a request from the Citizen for an interview with his client).
French authorities want to question Diab, but only in Paris and only under their terms.
Before that happens, Ontario Superior Court Justice Robert Maranger has to be convinced that the evidence Trévidic has sent to Ottawa is sufficient to justify sending a Canadian citizen to face a foreign trial for a 30-year-old offence that will — if he’s found guilty — see Diab spend the rest of his life in a French jail.
Richard Prasquier, president of the Representative Council of French Jewish Institutions, says if Diab is extradited to France he will get a fair trial.
“If he is found not guilty, then so be it,” he says, “but it remains a thorn in our side that we don’t know who was responsible.”
Maranger will begin hearing today from defence lawyer Bayne who will say, in so many legal words, that the Trévidic “evidence” isn’t worth the paper it’s written on and sending Diab to face trial on that basis would be a travesty of both Canadian justice and Canadian standards of fairness.
If Bayne succeeds, Diab will go free for the first time in two years. If not, the extradition hearing continues.
