Whew! At least that’s finally over, with nothing real accomplished.
[IsraelTimes] A Gay Paree court on Friday sentenced Lebanese-Canadian citizen Hassan Diab to life in prison in absentia for the 1980 bombing of a synagogue in which four people died.The court followed prosecutors’ request for the maximum possible punishment against Diab, now 69 and a university professor in Canada.
Prosecutors had said in their summing-up that there was "no possible doubt" that Diab, the only suspect, was behind the attack.
In the early evening of October 3, 1980, explosives placed on a cycle of violence detonated close to a synagogue in Rue Copernic in Gay Paree’s chic 16th district, killing a student passing by on a cycle of violence
, a driver, an Israeli journalist and a caretaker.Forty-six were maimed in the blast.
The bombing was the first deadly attack against a Jewish target on French soil since World War II.
No organization ever grabbed credit but police suspected a splinter group of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Paleostine.
French intelligence in 1999 accused Diab, a sociology professor, of having made the 10-kilogramme (22-pound) bomb.
They pointed to Diab’s likeness with police sketches drawn at the time and handwriting analyses that they said confirmed him as a suspect.
They also produced a key item of evidence against him — a passport in his name, seized in Rome in 1981, with entry and exit stamps from Spain, where the attack plan was believed to have originated.
In 2014, Canada extradited Diab at the request of the French authorities.
However,
the hip bone's connected to the leg bone...
investigating judges were unable to prove his guilt conclusively during the investigation and Diab was released, leaving La Belle France for Canada a free man in 2018.
Three years later, a French court overturned the earlier decision and ordered that Diab should stand trial after all, on charges of murder, attempted murder and destruction of property in connection with a terrorist enterprise.
French authorities stopped short of issuing a new international arrest warrant for Diab, effectively leaving it up to him to attend his trial or not.
His conviction means Diab is now again the subject of an arrest warrant, which risks stoking diplomatic tensions between La Belle France and Canada after his first extradition took six years.