After decades of dead ends, a young and ambitious judge – known for finding new ways to interpret old evidence – takes over the Copernic synagogue case. He narrows his search down to one man who he finds living a quiet life in the capital city of Canada.
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DANA: Last time, on the Copernic Affair…
ORON: My mother told my brother that she will just go to the fruit store on Copernic Street to bring some figs, but this was the last time my brother saw her.
DANA: On October 3rd, 1980, a bomb was detonated outside a synagogue in Paris…
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…
ANNETTE: It was a war zone. People running, people crying. Blood all over. Corpses.
DANA: Four people were killed. Dozens injured. With very little to go on, the police began chasing whatever leads they could find.
JACQUES: [Speaking French]
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 . That was when the direction of the investigation started turning away from the far right and towards the Middle East.
DANA: Despite this new information, the investigation hit a dead end, and for years there was no progress in the case of the Copernic Street bombing.
It looked like whoever had done this… had gotten away with it.
And things stayed that way for decades.
MUSIC
ALEX: I’m Alex Atack.
DANA: I’m Dana Ballout.
ALEX: From Canadaland, this is the Copernic Affair.
MUSIC
[Bit of ambi from the street outside, the night of the attack]
ALEX: The night of the attack on Copernic Street, rabbi Michael Williams was interviewed by a TV station.
MICHAEL WILLIAMS: A message to the anti semites, all of France, the Jewry of France…
ALEX: He had a clear message to the perpetrators of this attack.
MICHAEL WILLIAMS: Nous n’avons pas peur et demain matin, nous allons prier dans cette synagogue de la rue Copernic, demain matin et la semaine prochaine et toute la semaine et pour toujours.
ALEX: He said – we’re not afraid. And tomorrow, we’ll come back to pray in the synagogue. Tomorrow morning, and next week, and every week, forever. We’re not afraid.
MICHAEL WILLIAMS: Nous n’avons pas peur.
MUSIC
ALEX: The rabbi kept his word.
In the days after the attack, he held his services as usual. Amongst the piles of rubble and glass from the synagogue’s shattered ceiling .
PASCAL: Et donc, quand j’ai passé ma bar-mitsva qui n’a pas été annulée. Donc je l’ai passée trois semaines après dans les décombres, dans la synagogue qui était telle quelle avec les le toit, enfin le plafond effondré, etc. Donc j’ai quand même passé ma bar-mitsva comme prévu. Et en fait les offices ont continué à être célébrés habituellement par la suite.
ALEX: Three weeks later, Pascal – who was there on the night of the bombing – came back. For his bar mitzvah.
PASCAL: Pour sécuriser la synagogue, parce que c’était quand même un événement extrêmement traumatisant. Et donc la synagogue s’est organisée pour former un groupe de sécurité pour fouiller les gens à l’entrée, pour surveiller à l’entrée qui rentrait, qui rentrait, ce qui se passait, etc. Pour être beaucoup plus vigilant. Après cet événement.
DANA: Things were different. More tense.
The community arranged extra security, and searched people at the doors on the way in. Everyone had to be much more vigilant.
The congregation tried to rebuild a sense of normalcy.
But for Pascal – carrying on like normal – was impossible.
DANA: He was having flashbacks – to the night of the bombing.
He went back to school – but didn’t talk about it with anybody. He knew his classmates just wouldn’t understand.
PASCAL: Le problème, c’est qu’on ne savait pas pourquoi. Donc quoi dire? Comment? Comment expliquer ce qui s’était passé alors que soi même on n’a pas les réponses?
DANA: Pascal’s parents tried to help him process what had happened. But as a parent, how do you do that, when you don’t even understand it yourself?
PASCAL: Alors en fait, même moi j’étais très jeune. Mais même mes parents, les adultes n’ont pas compris ce qui s’était passé puisque finalement ça n’a pas été revendiqué de façon.
DANA: Part of the reason the adults around him couldn’t comprehend what happened was because nobody was charged for the attack.
MUSIC
ALEX: As the years passed, it felt like nobody would be held accountable for the explosion at the Copernic synagogue. As though the case had slipped from the back burner and into oblivion, never to be solved.
PASCAL: Moi j’étais jeune, donc je suis encore relativement jeune, mais beaucoup sont morts. Beaucoup. Mon père est mort il y a dix ans déjà. Et enfin, plus que ça il y a quinze ans. Et et beaucoup de gens, il y a 40, forcément, il y a 44 ans, ne sont plus là pour témoigner
ALEX: I was young, he says. But many have died. My father died ten years ago already … So ultimately, for them, all this remained unpunished and they didn’t get any reparation for their trauma.
PASCAL: Donc finalement, pour eux, tout ça est resté impuni et n’ont pas eu réparation de finalement de ce traumatisme qui s’est produit.
MUSIC
ALEX: But in 2007, nearly thirty years after the bombing, a new investigative judge at the high court anti-terrorism unit in Paris picked up the case.
TREVIDIC: Yeah. My name is Trévidic. It’s difficult to spell in English. T-R-É-V-I-D-I-C. Marc. Actually, I am a French judge.
Chapter 2: Trevidic’s investigation begins
DANA: Marc Trévidic was a hard man to pin down. We spent months going back and forth with him, trying to convince him to sit down for an interview.
TREVIDIC: I really refuse a lot of interviews about this case, because it was too touchy.
DANA: He was reluctant, but eventually, we came to an agreement.
He would talk to us on one specific condition: he would not answer any questions about the evidence in the case.
We took what we could get.
MUSIC
ALEX: Unlike judges in the US, Canada, or the UK, in France, the role of an investigating judge is to interview witnesses and gather evidence themselves.
TREVIDIC: It’s not really easy to explain, but of course, it’s a product of French history.
ALEX: Then they make a call on whether or not there’s enough evidence to proceed with a trial.
What they don’t do, is decide whether somebody is guilty or innocent.
And these judges are revered in France – there are even TV dramas about them.
It’s a big job. Reserved for the most respected investigators in the country, who generally take on the highest-profile cases.
DANA: Was this, like a dream of yours to get this kind of position?
TREVIDIC: Oh, no. Not a dream. No. I had many dreams, but not. Not that sort of dream. No no no no. You know, you accept a job and after that it’s interesting. And you are inside your job and you are under pressure, etc. You don’t think I am going to do something else.
DANA: Dream job or not, this role brought a lot of attention to Marc Trevidic – and he seemed to revel in the spotlight.
ARCHIVE – 00:00:44 Trévidic singing on TV
DANA: At the end of a TV interview in 2016, he even hopped on stage with the house band and belted out a Velvet Underground cover!!!!
ARCHIVE – 00:00:44 Trévidic singing on TV
TREVIDIC: I think we all need something to forget our job.
DANA: Marc Trévidic was an effective investigative judge – and he was ambitious. His work took him all over the world, but he told me was particularly drawn to the Middle East.
TREVIDIC: It was very interesting for me because I was always attracted with those countries, the Middle East, etc. I did a lot of travelling in these countries.
DANA: Ah, interesting… What was it that attracted you to these countries…?
TREVIDIC: It’s difficult to say. At the beginning it was only a romantic attraction, you see, like when you read Lawrence of Arabia. It’s a long time ago, you see, it’s not like that anymore. And I learned Arabian language, and uh I have some capabilities. And I was attracted by that.
(beat)
ALEX: By the 2000s, his decades of experience had earned Marc Trevidic a reputation – as a stubborn investigator who could find new ways to interpret old evidence.
He told us that when he got the job, he was handed around 80 cases.
TREVIDIC: So I looked at the cases.
ALEX: Too many to take on all at once.
TREVIDIC: The difficulty for me was to decide which case I’m going to read first.
ALEX: He prioritised cases that had the best chance of leading to an arrest – of resulting in some kind of justice or closure for the victims.
TREVIDIC: I chose to work on the old cases and where people had died, you see? the problem is that if it’s an old case, if you wait too long, it’s going to be a really cold case.
ALEX: When he was assigned the Copernic case, there was a lot of material waiting for him in the file.
Starting with – as we learned in our last episode – the French police’s best working theory, that the group behind this attack was from somewhere in the Middle East.
ALEX: And when Mark Trévidic picked up the file he saw something even more specific.
It was a tip from the early 1980s, from an intelligence report citing unnamed sources who claimed to know who was behind the bombing.
A Palestinian militant group – called the PFLP-OS – which broke off from a bigger, faction called the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, or the PFLP.
MUSIC
Chapter 3: Who are the PFLP-OS?
ALEX: To understand the PFLP-OS, we spoke with Saverio Leopardi, who teaches international history of the Middle East at the University of Padova in Italy.
SAVERIO: I’ve been researching the history of the Palestinian national movement for about ten years, even more…
ALEX: And we asked him about these two groups: The PFLP and the PFLP-OS.
SAVERIO: How much time do you have? I’ll try to be as brief as possible.
ALEX: He explained that the PFLP was formed in 1967 – to fight for Palestinian liberation, and against Israeli occupation.
The group carried out attacks across the Middle East and Europe, some of which were deadly.
And one of their missions was to find new ways to draw attention to their cause.
SAVERIO: PFLP became renowned internationally because of this spectacular attack tactic of hijacking planes and actually their stated goal was to bring the world’s attention over the Palestinian cause.
LEILA KHALED (ARCHIVE): By hijacking those planes, we can tell people – there’s a war. There’s a cause here in the Middle East.
ALEX: The most famous of these hijackings was in September 1970…
The PFLP hijacked five planes from across Europe and managed to redirect three of them to a desert airstrip in Jordan.
NEWSREEL (ARCHIVE): [00:02:20] responsibility for the hijackings was claimed by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine – a relatively small organisation with strong Marxist leanings.
ALEX: After a week-long ordeal, one hijacker was killed – but none of the passengers were hurt.
And the spectacle made headlines around the world.
NEWSREEL: The PFLP contains people who believe virtually any action is justifiable if, in their eyes, it advances the cause of Palestinian nationalism.
DANA: In a way – they got what they wanted. The world now knew about the PFLP.
But as the years went on, a rift began to spread within the group – as the leadership disagreed more and more about these kinds of performative tactics.
Some believed they forced Western media to pay attention to the Palestinian plight. That they were a good thing.
But others thought these tactics were a distraction – and did more harm than good.
So the PFLP began to splinter. And one of those offshoots… was called the PFLP-OS. (OS standing for special operations in French)
According to the intelligence report Marc Trévidic had found in the Copernic dossier – it was this splinter group – the PFLP-OS – that was responsible for the attack on Copernic Street.
Saverio Leopardi said the group acted independently, adopting tactics that their parent group did not condone. Basically – they went rogue.
SAVERIO: It had not many operatives and acted independently.
ALEX: When you say not many, I mean, how many are we talking?
SAVERIO: like 100 or something because they work as really cells. So they don’t really need huge numbers to carry out these kind of attacks.
MUSIC
DANA: So back to the intelligence reports that Marc Trevidic was looking at in the Copernic case file.
That first report may have pointed to the PFLP-OS, but it didn’t name individuals.
It wasn’t until he dug further into the dossier that another intelligence report caught his eye.
And this is the one piece of evidence that Marc Trevidic actually did bring up in our conversation.
It was from 1999… and included a list of around 10 names of specific people who were suspects in the Copernic bombing.
TREVIDIC: It was other information with names and precise information. And they say, this guy has done that, this girl has done that, etc, etc.
DANA: One of the names on this list was: Hassan … Diab.
MUSIC
ALEX: We did get our hands on some of these reports, and given how important this intelligence is to the case… I wish we could tell you more about it.
But after a year of reporting, dozens of interviews, and requests for government documents, the source of the information is still unclear.
Even Marc Trévidic barely knew anything about it.
TREVIDIC: The main problem for investigating judges in anti-terrorism is that you are working with intelligence services, but they cannot tell you their sources. So you can try to think about that and have some clue, but they’re not going to tell you. It’s classified.
ALEX: But it didn’t matter. The report had given him something to work with. Finally – a promising lead in this case after nearly three decades.
MUSIC
ALEX: And there was more evidence in this dossier that pointed to Hassan Diab.
Including – a photocopy of a passport.
In October 1981 – a year after the attack on Copernic Street – Italian police arrested a man at the airport in Rome.
His name was Ahmed Ben Mohamed, and he had just landed on a flight from Beirut.
The Italian authorities knew Ben Mohamed was a member of the PFLP-OS, and took him aside at the airport. When they searched him, they found a stash of passports.
(beat)
One of those passports… belonged to a man named Hassan Diab.
The French investigators didn’t have the passport itself – just a photocopy of it.
DANA: Inside was a photo, of course – taken in the late 1960s. To Trévidic, the picture bore an uncanny resemblance to the police sketches of the man who was suspected of carrying out the Copernic attack.
Importantly – there were entry and exit stamps in the passport, showing travel in and out of Europe.
And the dates lined up with the weeks surrounding the bombing.
So Marc Trevdic made some phone calls, leaned on some contacts in the FBI and Lebanese authorities, and eventually learned that the Hassan Diab identified in the passport had obtained a PhD from Syracuse University in New York in the early 90s – and was now working as a sociology professor at a university in Ottawa, Canada.
So he had an idea: Remember, the police had a limited sample of the perpetrator’s handwriting – five words from the hotel card he’d filled out shortly before committing the bomb attack.
With the help of American authorities, Trevidic obtained a sample of Hassan Diab’s handwriting – from his PhD application, and some immigration records.
Trévidic had these documents analyzed against the handwriting from the hotel card.
They were found to be a match.
ALEX: And there was one more thing, tucked away in a French police archive. More information that pointed to the Hassan Diab in Canada.
It was in a decades-old police interrogation record.
In 1988, a Lebanese man called Youssef El Khalil was questioned by French police as part of a different investigation into potential terror threats. Nothing to do with the Copernic attack.
Yousef el Khalil told French authorities that he was close to the PFLP in the 1980s. So – the police officers to took note of the names in his address book.
One of the names on that list – was Hassan Diab.
ALEX: Youssef El Khalil told them Hassan was a friend of his from their university days in Beirut.
He said that Hassan Diab was involved with some fringe socialist group that was – apparently – linked to the PFLP.
[ring ring]
So we hoped he might want to talk.
ALEX: Hi, is this Mr. Youssef El Khalil?
YOUSEF: Speaking.
ALEX: But… no luck.
ALEX: Your name has come up quite a lot in the court documents, and I was wondering if you might be open to speaking to us.
YOUSSEF: Uh, not, so sorry, I’m not.
ALEX: I kept trying.
ALEX: It’s just… Mr. Khalil, I think your testimony is very important in the case, and we would love the opportunity to talk to you, since you haven’t –
ALEX: But – it was a definite no.
DANA: That was the last we heard from Youssef el Khalil. But – he is now Lebanon’s Finance Minister… and we suspect this is why, or partly why, he didn’t want to talk.
After some digging, we did manage to get a hold of the transcript of his 1988 interrogation – and a testimony he gave decades later.
Here’s what these documents say.
Youssef el Khalil did know Hassan Diab for about a decade .
And – he couldn’t say for sure – but Hassan Diab seemed sympathetic towards the PFLP at the time. But he had no proof he was ever directly involved with the group.
ALEX: For Trévidic, a clearer picture of Hassan Diab was starting to emerge.
Of a young university student from Lebanon, who had gotten involved in Marxist university politics – but who had violent ambitions.
And who had followed those ambitions into joining a militant group, and helping plan and execute an attack outside the Copernic synagogue in 1980.
ALEX: It wasn’t a straight shot, but finally, after decades of dead ends and dropped leads, Marc Trevedic felt he had enough circumstantial evidence to implicate Hassan Diab in he Copernic Synagogue bombing.
So, twenty-eight years after the explosion, and a year after he picked up the case, Marc Trévidic submitted a request to Canada’s Justice Department – to extradite Hassan Diab to France for further investigation and to bring him to trial.
MUSIC
Chapter 6: Oron meeting with Trevidic
(beat / turn page /new chapter)
DANA: When I was speaking to Marc Trévidic, he said, sure, a big part of his job is to bring people to justice. But justice is just a word.
Sometimes it can feel abstract.
The victims of the crime though – they’re real.
TREVIDIC: When you are an investigating judge, you are working for the victims. It seems that for the victims, the bomb attack was yesterday because their life has changed forever.
But you must also keep your distance, because you are a judge and okay, but I’m not going to give you a guy, a convicted man because you need a convicted man. I want to be sure that the guy is guilty.
ALEX: In 2008, Marc Trevidic set up a meeting with some of the victims and their families.
Oron Shagrir – whose mother Aliza was killed in the explosion – was one of them.
ORON: I remember that it was sort of a gathering of the families with Trévidic.
TREVIDIC: I told them what I did during the past year and what I intend to do for the next year.
ORON: He came in and basically, he told us, I mean, all the families together about the case.
He was very, very detailed. I should say, for us, he was very impressive. He was young. He presented the case in a very impressive way. Very convincing way. And he was determined to track down the attackers. So, for us, the families, I guess it was – wow. Because as you said, we haven’t heard anything for so many years.
ALEX: At this meeting, Trévidic laid out everything so far that pointed to Hassan Diab.
ALEX: Was this the first time you’d heard the name Hassan Diab come up,?
ORON: Yes, yes. We haven’t heard it before at all. This was astonishing for us, I mean, that something like this can happen at all. And in a way, we were also happy that they tracked down the guy who actually planted the bomb.
MUSIC
DANA: At this point, French investigators felt confident they could prove Hassan Diab was responsible for detonating the bomb outside the synagogue.
But of course there’s another version of this story,. So one cold, snowy weekend a few months ago…
DANA: So, we are almost at Hassan’s house…
I traveled to Ottawa to meet Hassan Diab.
DANA: Hi Hassan!
HASSAN:, how are you doing guys? Sorry I missed your calls, it looks like the telephone was upstairs…
(beat)
DANA: Coming up, on the Copernic Affair…
HASSAN: I saw this SWAT Team… I kept looking at them in shock, like, what’s going on?
NAWAL: Anybody who knows him will know what a decent, caring, and peaceful person he is. Really peaceful. And would never, ever commit a crime like this.
BERNIE: it came to a point where I just couldn’t believe that people didn’t understand that this, that this was not the guy.
DANA: But Hassan,are you able to answer the question, like yes or no?
DANA: The Copernic Affair is a production of Canadaland in partnership with House of Many Windows.
The series is written and produced by me, Dana Ballout, and Alex Atack.
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
Special thanks this episode to Antonia Kerrigan and to Lauren Soubise at Leeds University School of Law, who helped us understand French investigative judges.
Thanks for listening.
ENDS
