Forty three years after the bombing of the rue Copernicus synagogue in Paris, which killed four people and injured dozens, the sole defendant, Canadian-Lebanese Hassan Diab, was sentenced in absentia to life imprisonment.

The hearing lasted three weeks. After eight hours of deliberations, the special criminal court of Paris imposed the maximum possible sentence on the 69-year-old university student and ordered that an arrest warrant be issued against him.

“We will carefully consider the next moves of the French government, what the French courts choose to do. But we will always be here to defend Canadians and their rights,” assured Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in a press conference he gave.

The history

On October 3, 1980, at around 6:35 p.m., a motorcycle bomb exploded near the synagogue, a short distance from the Champs-Élysées: it was the first time since World War II that France’s Jewish community had been targeted murderous attack.

During the trial, the prosecution emphasized that life imprisonment was the only sentence that could be imposed on Hassan Diab who was “undoubtedly” the perpetrator. No one has yet claimed responsibility for this attack.

Defense lawyers asked for their client’s acquittal, calling on the five judges “not to fall into a miscarriage of justice”.

Sketch of the bomber in 1980

The case was based on information from French authorities who attributed the attack to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-Special Operations (PLFP-SO), a breakaway faction of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. The attack went unsolved for many years but in 1999 new information suggested that a group to which Hassan Diab belonged had built the bomb and left it in front of the synagogue.

The court saw only photographs of the accused, at various ages, and compared them to the sketch of the man who bought the motorbike used in the attack.

Diab maintained that he was innocent and that he was not in Paris at the time, taking exams at the University of Beirut. But the court accepted that his alibi is undermined by a passport seized in Rome in 1981 bearing his name. The passport also bears entry and exit stamps from Spain, the country from which the attack group is said to have departed, on dates coinciding with the attack.

In 2018, the French authorities decided not to prosecute him. Diab was released and returned to Canada, but three years later the Court of Appeal overturned the previous decision and ordered him to stand trial for murder, attempted murder and criminal damage.

“The first judicial phase is over, it remains to be seen what will happen now, if Canada will issue Mr. Diab,” said an attorney representing the civil suit, David Perr.