Just before 6:30 pm on October 3rd, 1980, Oron Shagrir’s mother, Aliza, was walking down Rue Copernic in Paris, looking to buy some figs. Minutes later, she was killed, along with three others, in an explosion that still haunts France today.
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ALEX: If you could just introduce yourself, Oron. Just tell me your name and who you are.
ORON: So, my name is Oron Shagrir. I’m from Jerusalem. I was born here in Jerusalem 63 years ago. I guess that I’m here to talk about the Copernic affair, the terror attack in which my mother was killed in 1980.
MUSIC
DANA: October 3rd, 1980. Paris, France.
ORON: My mother was just a tourist in Paris…
DANA: Her name was Aliza Shagrir, she was a film editor.
Aliza was in Paris with Oron’s brother.
The two of them were on their way to meet a family friend, when she stopped off at a grocery store on Copernic street – a quiet street, in an affluent neighbourhood in the west of the city.
ORON: Then my mother, when they arrived to the corner of Copernic and Lauriston, my mother told my brother that she will just go to the fruit store on Copernic Street to bring some figs and that she will meet my brother in a few minutes. This was the last time my brother saw her.
ALEX: There’s a well-known synagogue on Copernic street. It’s the oldest Reform synagogue in France, built in 1907. And on that Friday evening – the start of Sabbath – worshippers were beginning to file in before the service was due to start.
Pascal, who was 13 at the time, was amongst them.
PASCAL: C’était un jour normal. C’était le vendredi soir, le jour du shabbat. Donc on allait à l’office. J’étais avec mon frère et puis.
ALEX: He told us – it was a normal day. He was with his brother. Their parents, who would usually come too, were hosting a small party that evening, so they stayed home.
PASCAL: Et ce soir là, mes parents ne sont pas venus, ils sont restés chez eux, ils avaient une soirée.
DANA: By the time everyone had arrived, there were more than 300 people gathered inside. There were prayers and songs, then a few bar and bat mitzvahs to celebrate. So things were running longer than usual.
ALEX: Then at around 6:30PM – Pascal heard this… sound…
He felt the ground trembling. Shards of glass fell from the windows above him.
PASCAL: En fait, à treize ans, on sait pas ce que c’est qu’une bombe, on sait pas ce que c’est qu’un attentat…
DANA: Pascal first thought that this was an earthquake. That it might be the end of the world.
PASCAL: J’étais plutôt croyant et j’avais l’impression que c’était Dieu un peu qui? Une colère ou je ne sais pas.
DANA: Parts of the ceiling crumbled. Pieces of the wall were blown off. Dust and debris everywhere.
PASCAL: Et il y avait un rideau de flammes qui séparait la synagogue de la rue.
DANA: He remembers seeing a curtain of flames rising between the synagogue and the street.
Outside, there was chaos.
ARCHIVE [NEWSREEL]: L’explosion a eu lieu aux alentours de 18 h 45 à la synagogue israélite libérale de la rue Copernic, au numéro 24 de cette rue Copernic…
ALEX: A bomb had been detonated right outside the synagogue’s front doors.
Journalists rushed to the scene. Annette Levy Wilard from the newspaper Libération was one of them.
ANNETTE: It was a war zone. People running, people crying. Blood all over… corpses… It was, for me, for the first time in my life that I was facing dead people.
DANA: In the chaos afterward, the rabbi told a reporter that he saw at least two people dead. He’d later learn that there were more.
[MICHAEL WILLIAMS]: Une bombe qui s’est explosé avec une violence inouïe. Il y avait trois ou 400 personnes dans la synagogue et j’ai vu dans la rue au moins deux personnes mortes, au moins une personne absolument morte et plusieurs personnes grièvement blessées.
DANA:The timing of the bomb was no doubt intentional.
Around 6:30PM is when people should’ve been leaving the synagogue and heading home.
Had things run on time, a lot more people could’ve been hurt.
Still, four people were killed by the blast.
ALEX: Jean Barbe. A chauffeur, waiting in his car.
DANA: Philippe Bouissou. A young student riding past on his motorbike, going to meet his fiance.
ALEX: Hilario Lopes Fernandez. A hotel concierge, standing on the sidewalk.
DANA: And Oron’s mom, Aliza Shagrir.
ORON: They woke me up very early in the morning of the day after and told me […] She was 42 when she was killed. She was beautiful, joyful, very opinionated. In some ways, she was the centre of the family. Especially I think, her warmth and empathy. Because, as a child, she was the more dominant parent in the house taking care of us. I missed this for many years.
ALEX: Dozens more people were injured in the explosion. A teenager’s face was completely disfigured. An elderly woman’s legs were severed.
ANNETTE: And I wondered for many years, why did these people choose to hit the Copernic synagogue? I was really wondering why? Why?
ALEX: For France’s Jewish community, there was a time before the Copernic attack, and a time after.
Anti-semitism hadn’t gone away after world war two. But outright, direct violence targeted at Jews seemed like a thing of the past.
What happened on Copernic street shattered that.
MUSIC
ALEX: In the aftermath, the city was in a state of shock, and police were under immense pressure to find out who orchestrated this attack.
But shock soon transformed into paralysis.
For decades, it seemed like the perpetrator had gotten away with the bombing.
PASCAL: Parce que vous avez un ennemi invisible qui veut, qui veut votre mort sans que vous compreniez pourquoi en fait. Parce que finalement. Ça n’a pas de sens.
DANA: Pascal told us it was like living with an invisible enemy. Someone had tried to kill them. But that someone was a ghost.
DANA: I’m Dana Ballout.
ALEX: I’m Alex Atack.
DANA: From Canadaland, this is the Copernic Affair.
MUSIC
ALEX: Dana and I are journalists. We first met in Lebanon, where we both used to live, and we’ve worked together for years since.
Which is partly why this story caught our eye in the first place.
Because – years later, when French investigators finally did identify their prime suspect.
It turned out, he was a Lebanese-Canadian man. A sociology professor called Hassan Diab. Living a quiet life in Ottawa, Canada.
MUSIC
BERNIE: To have a terrorist in our midst in quiet old Ottawa… I was actually disgusted.
DANA: And the more we looked into it, the more we realised – this story wasn’t as straightforward as we thought…
So we started reporting. And ended up speaking to dozens of people – in Canada and in France… some of whom had never talked about this in public before.
NOUR AL KADI: My brother asked me, do you know Professor Hassan Diab? And I said, I know him very well. What’s wrong? And he said; this morning he was arrested.
ALEX: What we’ve found, the whole time we’ve been working on this story – is that it’s felt like we’re actually working on two different stories in parallel.
LINDA: How could anything like this happen to somebody like him?
DANA: You’re getting a bit emotional…
LINDA: I am, I am, yeah.
ALEX: Everybody agrees on the basic facts of what happened that night in Paris back in 1980. And that it was an awful tragedy.
CLEMENT: It was a tremendous shock in Paris, because it was the first time since maybe thirty years that a bomb attack was perpetrated in the street of Paris.
ALEX: But what they don’t agree on – is who was responsible for the bombing.
There’s the French story – that Hassan Diab is the person behind this attack – and now he’s living freely in Ottawa.
ANNETTE: When you see that the guy is lying… You know he’s guilty…
ALEX: Then there’s the story we’ve been told in Canada – that he’s an innocent man. A father, a husband, a well-liked professor, and a great friend
MAEVE: great cook. He’s very sociable. He’s a wonderful person
DANA: It’s a legal battle that has reached the highest courts in both countries…
TIM: There’s such strong evidence of his innocence that just has consistently been ignored by both the French and Canadian governments.
ALEX: World leaders have weighed in.
JUSTIN TRUDEAU: Hassan Diab, we have to recognise first of all, that what happened to him never should have happened…
ALEX: Investigators have spent decades looking for a culprit.
BERNIE: I believe he was being targeted because the French needed a scapegoat.
ALEX: But despite all this – 45 years later – The story of the Copernic synagogue bombing is still unfolding.
ALEX NEVE: It’s a movie you couldn’t even imagine writing the script of, because it’s so hard to believe, but it’s reality.
DANA: So – we got in touch with the man convicted of carrying out this attack to see if he would talk to us.
DANA: So, we are almost at Hassan’s house…
That’s later.
For now, we’re starting where this story began – in Paris.
MUSIC
Chapter 1: Annette
ALEX VOICE NOTE: Okay, so I’m just walking along Rue Copernic now Copernic Street.
ALEX: Early in our reporting, I went to Paris. And on the way to my first interview, I took a detour – to see the place where this story all started.
ALEX VOICE NOTE: Lots of people wearing umbrellas trying to stay out of the rain. I’m standing next to a lighting store. I think the store was destroyed in the attack. So I must be close to the synagogue. Oh, yeah. Here it is.
ALEX: It’s this stone art deco building with a big blue door surrounded by security gates and CCTV cameras. You might not even notice it’s a synagogue if you were just walking past.
ALEX VOICE NOTE: There’s a plaque out front in memory of all the victims of the attack. 3rd of October 1980.
ALEX: Later that afternoon – I met up with Annette Levy Wilard at her apartment. She’s the journalist who arrived on the scene of the attack just after it happened.
ANNETTE: You can, you can? Yeah, you can do the editing afterwards. So I can, uh, ask you what would be the right word. Yeah. Okay.
ALEX: I was there to ask her about the night of October 3rd 1980 – but when we sat down, she told me there was another story that she wanted to share first. A backstory.
Something that happened a few weeks before the attack on Copernic street.
ANNETTE: It’s the beginning of September.
ALEX: At the time, she was still a young reporter at the newspaper.
And there was this one night – when somebody phoned the office with a tip.
About a secretive French neo-Nazi group called FANE.
ANNETTE: They were called La FANE – F-A-N-E. Small neo-Nazi group, very small, maybe 50 people. But extreme right wing.
ALEX: The person on the phone said – this group is holding a clandestine meeting tonight. And here’s the address.
Annette’s editor asked her to go – to see if she could get them to talk – and maybe there’d be a story there.
ANNETTE: And as a journalist, I said, of course.
ALEX: So – that night – she showed up at the address – this shabby apartment north of the river in Paris.
ANNETTE: So I went upstairs, I opened the door, and I found myself with, I don’t know, 30 guys in a small room. So, these people were as surprised as I was, because they were not expecting a journalist to show up at their meeting.
ALEX: She introduced herself – said she was a journalist – and she wanted to write about them.
To her surprise, they let her in.
ANNETTE: And so I got my notebook. I started taking notes, you know, very professional.
ALEX: She expected these men might be a little more measured in their words with an outsider being in the room.
Instead, she found the opposite. They were comfortable around her.
ANNETTE: For two hours they talked about [gassing] Jews, you know, I mean, it was real Nazism in 1980 in Paris.
ALEX: In case you didn’t catch that – she said they talked about gassing Jews.
It was a horrifying, bat-shit situation to find herself in.
Before long, one of the men asked Annette for her full name.
And she told them.
ANNETTE: And I said … My name is Annette Levy.
ALEX: Levy. A Jewish name.
She felt the atmosphere in the room change.
ANNETTE: I was absolutely scared. I mean, I was really, really scared. I was telling myself, how do I get out of there?
ALEX: The way to get out – she decided – was to try and flatter the leader of the group – this guy called Mark Frederiksen.
ANNETTE: And so I said, okay, well, now I have to go. But, you know, I would like to interview you some more.
So, I got out, I went down the stairs. I run… running, running, running, running. I went to a phone booth. And I called my boss, crying. I couldn’t stop crying. And you know what he said? He said, go home and write! Now! Now. Which I didn’t because I was so shocked. So I went to have a drink.
ALEX: Annette did get that drink… and then she wrote the story.
The front page headline in Liberation the next day was: Two Hours of Hatred in France.
And she told us – it caused a stir – because, your average person just didn’t know that these kind of neo-Nazi groups existed in France.
But that soon changed.
A few weeks after Annette’s piece came out, there was a string of attacks on Jewish institutions across the city.
On September 27th gunmen attacked a Jewish school, a nursery, a synagogue and war memorial. With machine guns, and all in one day.
Two days later, another attack on a different synagogue.
In phone calls to French news agencies, all of these attacks were claimed by various far right groups.
Nobody was hurt in any of them – but it felt pretty clear to anybody paying attention that a pattern was starting to emerge.
MUSIC
DANA: The reason why Annette wanted to tell us all of this… is because a couple hours after the Copernic attack, a phone rang at the Agence France Presse offices in Paris.
A staffer picked up, and heard a man’s voice on the other end of the line.
He said he was a member of FANE And that they were responsible for the Copernic attack.
When AFP published this – Annette recognised the name FANE immediately.
This was the same group she’d written about just weeks before. The neo-Nazis, who held a secret meeting at that shabby apartment in Paris.
She didn’t buy their claim.
ANNETTE: And I said, right away, it cannot be these guys. I mean, they are clowns. Okay, they can do some damage somewhere, but they cannot organise such an attack, which is very sophisticated, as you know.
DANA: Annette thought: this attack was complex, well planned. But those guys that she met weeks earlier – they did NOT seem capable of pulling off something like this.
MUSIC
ALEX: Whatever Annette thought – it didn’t matter. Because of that phone call to AFP, the story had taken root: this attack was the work of the far right.
Newspapers published it. Politicians made statements, condemning neo-Nazism in France. They promised retribution
And over the next few weeks, police arrested 83 members of FANE and their sympathisers throughout France.
ANNETTE: And right away, a huge march against the extreme right wing, [00:25:00] against fascism… huge demonstrations.
Tens of thousands of people poured out into the streets of Paris in solidarity.
ARCHIVE [NEWSREEL]: Manifestation spontanée hier, vers 22 h, à Paris, des Champs-Elysées au boulevard Haussmann…
ALEX: There were offices and factories and high schools that let people out early – so their employees and students could go to the protests.
For a few days, it felt like the whole country – had come out to stand alongside the Jewish community.
And as protestors marched, the police started work – trying to figure out who was behind the attack.
Chapter 2: The investigation
ALEX: Can you introduce yourself? Just tell me your name and who you are.
JACQUES: My name is Jacques Poinas, and in 1980 I was a junior superintendent in the brigade criminelle, which is the homicide division in the Paris police.
DANA: Jacques was one of the first people to arrive at the scene of the attack. He saw the destruction the bomb had left behind. The burnt out cars. The bodies covered by sheets.
And amongst the chaos that night, his job was to start looking for clues. One of his first discoveries came a few days later.
The police had offered compensation for any vehicles that were destroyed in the bombing. But no one stepped forward to claim a motorcycle that was parked right in front of the synagogue.
Jacques spoke to us in French while our colleague Catherine translated.
JACQUES [FRENCH]: And the first thing that became obvious to us was that the device was placed on a motorcycle which was half destroyed by the explosion, but not completely.
CATHERINE: And the first thing that was obvious to them was that the bomb was placed underneath the motorbike that was almost destroyed, but not entirely.
JACQUES [FRENCH]: This motorcycle was partially destroyed. The licence plate normally located at the rear had completely disappeared, but we were able to note a number straight away.
DANA: Given where the motorcycle was lying on the street, and the way it was ripped apart, investigators deduced that the bomb must have been attached to it.
The explosive was 10kg of a material called PETN.
Despite how wrecked this motorcycle was, the police also managed to find a serial number on the bike.
JACQUES [FRENCH]: We found the location where the serial number was, the other number, the same serial number but engraved several times on the motorcycle.
DANA: From this serial number, they were able to track down the dealership where the motorcycle was purchased. Jacques and his team visited the store.
JACQUES [FRENCH]: And so obviously we go there and a team goes there…
CATHERINE: The people there they spoke to said that the motorbike had been sold second hand in the shop.
DANA: The shop workers remembered the guy who bought it.
CATHERINE: They said that he was a guy who spoke good French. But the way that they described him, he was kind of Middle Eastern.
DANA: They remembered him well enough to describe what he looked like to the police.
CATHERINE: The first thing that was interesting is that he paid for it in cash, in dollars in particular. The employees that asked him for ID because of the fact he was paying in a different currency, it was a bit strange.
DANA: The man paid 1000 dollars for the motorcycle – in cash – using 10 hundred dollar bills.
And he gave the address of the place he was staying at: – Hotel Celtic, about a 15 minute walk from Copernic street.
He also handed over his passport for them to see. It was a Cypriot passport, under the name Alexander Panadriyu.
The employees of the store also noted that he was in a rush, and said he’d come back in a couple weeks to finish the vehicle registration. But he never returned.
MUSIC
ALEX: After Jacques and his colleagues spoke to the people in the motorbike shop, they had a police sketch drawn up.
It’s this guy with dark eyes, dark hair, a moustache.
And then – when they started digging further into this new name – Alexander Panadriyu – they found another lead.
JACQUES [FRENCH]: We learned a few days later that Alexander Panadriyu had been arrested for stealing from a store in Montparnasse.
CATHERINE: They then found out a few days later that Alexander Panadriyu had been arrested for stealing in a shop in Montparnasse.
ALEX: Montparnasse – a neighbourhood in Paris.
CATHERINE: Essentially, he was stopped by the security guard. They had a scuffle. The police were called, his passport details were taken, but then he apologised.
ALEX: He tried to explain – he’d stolen the cutters because he didn’t have any francs. It was just a minor offence, so they basically let him go with a slap on the wrist.
JACQUES [FRENCH]: And so, finally, he was let free. Because the theft was minimal.
CATHERINE: But in that process, obviously, he’d been seen by several police officers. And all of their descriptions of him corroborated or matched up with the identikit that had already been gathered from the employees at the motorbike shop.
So now they had a rough idea of what the suspected attacker looked like.
And over the next few weeks, the investigators visited the Hotel Celtic, where this Alexander Panidriyu had stayed. The staff didn’t remember too much. But there was another person at the hotel who did.
She was a sex worker, who used to pick up clients in the hotel’s bar.
And she thought maybe this guy had been one of her clients, the night before the attack.
She described him as in his thirties.
Maybe Arab, or maybe Greek – she couldn’t quite tell where his accent was from.
He had messy, black hair, brown eyes. Short moustache. No glasses, but a vacant look in his eyes, that made her think maybe he needed them.
JACQUES [FRENCH]: She added the fact that he was circumcised. And that he had paid in dollars. So, it also seems improbable this carelessness of the terrorist on a mission, but who, on occasion, still benefits from Parisian gaiety.
CATHERINE: And she added the detail that he was circumcised, and that he paid in dollars. And again, that seems just unthinkable that a terrorist would think of, the night before committing a terrorist attack, having sex and feeling very relaxed about it.
ALEX: Again… he paid in dollars.
And there was one more clue they found at the hotel.
A form that the suspect had filled out – in his own handwriting, when he checked in.
He’d written just five words: Alexander Panadriyu. Larnaca, Cyprus. Technician.
MUSIC
DANA: The police’s investigation into the far right had hit a wall. All 83 far-right members who were arrested after the Copernic attack had solid alibis and were later released.
And when Jacques and his team put together the other clues they had – the witness statements and the way the attack was carried out – they realised something.
This theory that had gripped the entire country – that this attack was an escalation from smaller neo-Nazi activities in the months prior – was probably wrong.
Maybe Annette Levy Willard was right – in thinking that far-right groups like FANE were not organised enough to pull off this kind of attack.
JACQUES [FRENCH]: So, but in any case something which did not fit well with the far-right track already, and which obviously directed us towards the Middle East.
CATHERINE: That was when the direction of the investigation started turning away from the far right and towards the Middle East.
MUSIC
ALEX: Now that investigators had identified this so-called Middle East theory, it felt like they had a solid direction to head in.
So – they pivoted.
Across France, the police launched a manhunt to try and find this guy – Alexander Panadriyu.
But a few days later, Cypriot authorities came back to them with an update.
The passport was a forgery.
With this news, what had been the most solid lead for the French authorities evaporated, and the perpetrator of the Copernic bombing remained at large.
MUSIC
DANA: Eventually, the news cycle moved on, and the Copernic case slipped quietly onto the backburner.
This feeling that Pascal and other survivors felt – that they’d been attacked by an invisible enemy – it stayed with them for decades.. They felt forgotten by the authorities.
ALEX: Until, 27 years later… in 2007, when a new investigator entered the picture.
He was young, ambitious.
And determined to bring the case back from the edge of oblivion.
TREVIDIC: My name is Trévidic. Trévidic. Marc. Actually, I am a French judge. We never abandon a case. We never stop. It shows the importance of the fight against terrorism. You can have doors opened many years after the attack,
ALEX: Marc Trévidic pried open doors that had been shut for decades. And the investigation into the Copernic bombing resumed in full force.
MUSIC CONT.
DANA: Coming up on the Copernic Affair…
ORON: Yeah. I mean,It was really astonishing, and in a way we were all so happy that they tracked down the guy who actually planted the bomb.
BERNIE: I believe that I put a man’s life not just necessarily at risk sitting in a jail cell, but turned his life around in ways that are unimaginable
NAWAL: The same day he was arrested, an FBI agent knocked at my door here in California.
DANA: So can you introduce yourself?
HASSAN: Oh, Hassan Diab. It is a surrealistic story… put it this way.
ALEX: The Copernic Affair is a production of Canadaland in partnership with House of Many Windows.
The series is written and produced by me, Alex Atack, and Dana Ballout.
Our editor is Julie Shapiro.
Additional production by Noor Azrieh.
Additional research, production and translation support by Catherine Bennett.
Sound design and mixing by Resonant Fields Audio
Original Music by The Tie-Breakers.
Our Artwork is by Tony Wang
Our Executive Producers are Jesse Brown and Julie Shapiro.
And Jesse Brown is Canadaland’s Publisher And Editor
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ENDS
