OTTAWA, Canada (WJC) — Canada’s Supreme Court has paved the way for the extradition to France of a suspect in the 1980 terrorist attack against the Copernic Synagogue in Paris.
The decision brings to an end 60-year-old Hassan Diab’s six-year legal battle to avoid what he said would be an unfair prosecution in France for a crime he insists he did not commit.
Canada’s top court issued its decision in a one-line statement, saying his appeal of a lower court ruling and the government’s extradition order was “dismissed without costs.”
Diab, who was taken into custody Wednesday pending the announcement, could now be flown to Paris at any time in the next 45 days. There he will be questioned by an investigating judge before criminal proceedings can begin. If convicted, Diab, a sociologist of Lebanese origin who received Canadian citizenship in 2006, could face life in prison.
The 1980 bombing on the narrow Copernic Street was the first deadly attack against the French Jewish community since the Nazi occupation in World War II. Explosives packed in the saddlebags of a parked motorcycle were detonated as worshippers were starting to exit the synagogue. The blast killed three Frenchmen and a young Israeli woman. Forty people were injured.
Representative Council of French Jewish Institutions President Roger Cukierman told the news agency AFP that the evidence was so compelling that “it would have been beyond understanding” if Canada had refused France’s extradition request.
Outside Canada’s Supreme Court on Thursday Diab’s supporters held a rally, chanting: “Shame! Shame!”
Dozens of people, including American activist Noam Chomsky and former Canadian solicitor general Warren Allmand, have pressed Ottawa to stop the extradition. Diab’s lawyer Donald Bayne maintained that the evidence “would never meet Canadian constitutional standards for a criminal trial.”
Diab was arrested at his home in an Ottawa suburb in November 2008 at the request of French authorities who alleged he was a member of the Popular Front of the Liberation of Palestine. The extremist group pioneered armed jetliner hijackings in the 1960s and was believed to be behind a string of deadly attacks in Europe, including the Paris bombing.
Canada’s justice minister signed an order in April 2012 to send Diab to France after a Canadian court approved his extradition, despite its concerns that the French case was “weak.”
Diab, a Canadian of Lebanese descent, has said he has “absolutely no connection whatsoever to the terrible 1980 attack,” while his legal team argued he should not be extradited because a conviction in Canada would be unlikely. His lawyers have mainly sought to discredit what they called “fatally flawed” handwriting analysis of a Paris hotel slip in evidence — five words printed in simplistic block letters. France says the hotel registration card was signed under a false identity — a Cypriot named Alexander Panadriyu — which was also presented to purchase the motorcycle used in the bombing.
An appeals court ruled that it was satisfied the minister had properly tested the allegations of torture, citing him as saying that Diab “is not being surrendered to a country that condones the use of torture-derived evidence.”
As for whether Canada should extradite one of its citizens to face a foreign prosecution, the appeals court noted that Diab had not been a Canadian national at the time of the bombing and so Canada was treaty-bound to extradite him.
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Preceding provided by World Jewish Congress