France requests that Hassan be brought to Paris to stand trial. One of Canada’s most respected lawyers takes the case and fights the extradition. As the hearings drag on for years, more people start to question the French evidence against Diab.
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DANA: Last time, on the Copernic Affair…
After decades at a standstill, a French judge brought the Copernic synagogue investigation back to life – and identified a suspect.
DANA: So can you introduce yourself?
HASSAN: Oh, Hassan Diab.
DANA: A Lebanese-Canadian sociology professor living a quiet life in Ottawa.
HASSAN: It was one of the biggest shocks in my life.
DANA: Hassan Diab thought that all of this would just … go away.
But it didn’t.
And one morning in the fall of 2008, a SWAT team arrived at his door.
HASSAN: And on November 13th, in the early morning I was getting ready, I finished my cup of coffee, and boom. Screaming and yelling, and they dragged me outside with handcuffs.
MUSIC
Chapter 1: Bernie + negative media coverage
DANA: I’m Dana Ballout.
ALEX: I’m Alex Atack.
DANA: From Canadaland, this is the Copernic Affair.
MUSIC
BERNIE: The Copernic Synagogue was one of the most famous synagogues in all of Europe. It stood as a bastion of Judaism, if I could put it that way. And so, the targeting of a symbol of our faith, it was a shocking, brutal attack.
MUSIC CONT.
Our history is such that, you know, people, especially in the latter half of the 20th century, wanted to obliterate us from the face of the earth, and they almost succeeded. And so when synagogues are bombed there is a huge dark cloud that hovers over our community.
DANA: In 2008, Bernie Farber was the leader of a Jewish advocacy group in Canada.
He’s the son of a Holocaust survivor. His father was the only surviving Jewish person from his small town of Bocki, in Poland.
BERNIE: It was his courage and bravery that drove me towards understanding that the world is not always such a bright, shiny place.
DANA: Bernie has been campaigning and speaking out against anti-Semitism for his entire career.
And he still remembered the attack on the Copernic synagogue – three decades after it happened – and how it shook Jewish communities everywhere.
ALEX: So when the authorities arrested Hassan Diab in 2008 – Bernie was appalled to learn that the suspect in this attack was living in Ottawa.
He thought – finally – justice is being served.
BERNIE: Absolutely. And I didn’t hesitate, I didn’t hesitate. I did everything that I could to make sure that people understood that this was a terrorist bombing that targeted Jews specifically for one reason only, and that is that they were Jews.
We said, thank God, that’s what we said, that they caught this person.
ALEX: Almost right away, he started getting calls from journalists – asking him to comment on the arrest.
DANA: At the time, there was an article that we’ve found where you applauded the French and the Canadian authorities for their work on the case.
BERNIE: I did. Here here. I did. To have a terrorist in our midst in quiet old Ottawa. It was a little bit mind-boggling, I have to say, and I was actually disgusted.
MUSIC
ALEX: About a year after Hassan Diab was arrested, The hearings to extradite him from Canada to France began. In November 2009, at a courtroom in downtown Ottawa.
DANA: The hearings attracted a lot of media attention.
People wanted to know: how on earth could this suspected terrorist be hiding in plain sight, in our quiet, peaceful city? How could he be teaching in our universities, hiking in our parks?
Bernie Farber wanted answers to those questions too. So he attended the extradition hearings himself.
BERNIE: Either I was in court in Ottawa during the extradition hearings or one of my colleagues was monitoring it for us. I was sitting there really quite smugly thinking, I just want to be part of this historical record, to say that I was here and I heard it and I can say to my children, you know, I did what I had to do in order to bring this person to justice.
MUSIC
DANA: It’s important to remember here – what was playing out in this courtroom in Ottawa was not a criminal trial.
Add a beat
The judge wasn’t there to determine whether Hassan Diab was guilty or innocent.
Add a beat
The only thing to be decided was whether or not the French case was credible. Whether there was enough evidence to extradite him to France.
Chapter 2: The French case
DANA: A bit of context here: Canada and France are close allies with a well-established extradition treaty.
If France wants to try a Canadian citizen for serious charges like murder and requests an extradition to France, chances are almost certain Canada would oblige.
The only way for Hassan Diab – a Canadian citizen since 1993 – to fight that extradition was to try and prove to a Canadian court that France’s case against him was SO thin and SO flawed that it stood no chance.
ALEX: Three government lawyers in Canada represented the French case. They didn’t respond to any of our interview requests.
So what we know about their argument comes from court documents.
DANA: For the most part, they relied on the dossier that French investigators had put together over the past few decades.
Here’s a quick recap of what led them to Hassan Diab.
ALEX: One: Hassan Diab’s passport was found in the possession of a PFLP-OS member who was stopped at the airport in Rome.
The passport had entry and exit stamps from Europe around the date of the attack.
DANA: Two: A witness who was close to him in the 1970s told police that yes, Hassan Diab was associated with a militant group back then.
ALEX: Three: Back in 1980, police in Paris collected eyewitness descriptions of the suspect and had composite sketches drawn up. The French lawyers argued that – the person in these sketches looked like Hassan Diab.
DANA: Four: Intelligence reports from 1999 named Hassan Diab as one of several people involved in the attack.
ALEX: And five: A handwriting sample – that the French say – showed Hassan Diab’s handwriting was a match for the bomber’s.
Taken together – they argued – this was damning evidence that Hassan Diab was one of the people behind the synagogue attack in 1980.
Considering all this, the odds looked pretty high that Hassan Diab would be sent to France to stand trial.
ALEX: In short: he needed a good lawyer.
DOORMAN: What channel is this?
DANA: We’re just doing a podcast for Canadaland.
DANA: Don Bayne’s office is right around the corner from the University of Ottawa – where Hassan Diab first learned he was a suspect in this case.
DOORMAN: Yeah, bet he’s an interesting guy, has a lot of history there.
DANA: George, the doorman at his office building, called him – “The Great Don Bayne”.
DOORMAN: Well he’s well they call him the quarterback because he was a good football player. But he’s a top lawyer.
MUSIC
DON BAYNE: My name is Don Bayne. I’m Hassan Diab’s lawyer.
DANA: You’re also a giant criminal lawyer in Canada.
DON BAYNE: No, I’m an average criminal lawyer in Canada.
DANA: Don Bayne seemed a little… tired. And sitting down in his office, I could see why. There were piles of paper everywhere, notebooks, documents he needed to sign… and boxes.
DON: I would say there’s in excess of 50, there’s probably 40 more in my document storage.
DANA: The perimeter of his office was lined with cardboard boxes – most of them labelled in all caps: DIAB.
Something else caught my eye: a picture of Hassan Diab and his two kids on the shelf behind Don Bayne’s desk – right alongside all of his plaques and accolades.
He’s grown close to the Diab family since he first took on the case in 2009.
Back then he warned them it would be an uphill battle.
DON BAYNE: It was only when we got into the details of the case we saw that none of this was reliable evidence.
DANA: Don Bayne’s job – in that Ottawa courtroom – was to convince the extradition judge of this.
First – he attacked the intelligence reports – which explicitly listed Hassan Diab as one of the people behind the bombing.
DON BAYNE: Some of this alleged intelligence came from Israel. Some of it came from the old Stasi records, East Germany, that tortured people.
ALEX: We did manage to get our hands on the Israeli intelligence report – and it does contain errors. The date of the attack is wrong, names are mixed up, Hassan’s field is listed as psychology instead of sociology… the list goes on.
As for the German intelligence reports. We’ve asked everybody we talked to for more information on them – lawyers, judges, magistrates, ex-police officers, journalists.
We filed information requests with the Stasi archives in Berlin, and the BKA – Germany’s federal police.
Nobody could give us any more detail on that intelligence.
ALEX: While they weren’t relied on as evidence – the intelligence reports were in the record of the case, and helped lead the French to Hassan Diab. And that was Don Bayne’s key argument in the courtroom: You can’t use unreliable intelligence reports to identify a guy and then extradite him to a country where he could spend the rest of his life in prison if you don’t know anything about one the major clues in your investigation.
DON BAYNE: It’s unknown sources. Unknown circumstances. Who said what? When? Is this a human source? Is this just something some analyst made up? We have no idea.
DANA: Do they have an idea? Do the French courts have an idea?
DON BAYNE: No. The first record of the case conceded they did not know where this intelligence came from.
DANA: Next, he attacked the police sketches – which French lawyers argued resembled Hassan Diab in the late 1970s.
Don Bayne’s argument here was simple.
The witnesses who were interviewed described the attacker inconsistently.
Some said he had glasses, some said he didn’t.
Some remembered long hair, others said it was short.
Some remember a handlebar moustache. Some said it was closely cropped.
Without any consistency, how could the sketches be reliable?
ALEX: Then there’s Hassan Diab’s passport.
French investigators had a photocopy of his real passport, which in 1981 had been found in the possession of a member of the PFLP-OS – the group French investigators believed was behind the attack.
In court, Don Bayne argued that Hassan Diab had lost his passport – as he told us last episode.
That it was in a bag on the back of his motorcycle – which had fallen off in transit, or been snatched.
And that after Diab lost the passport, it ended up in the wrong hands – possibly through the black market that thrived in Lebanon during the civil war.
DON BAYNE: The passport doesn’t prove anything. Who knows if it’s true or not true, but the fact that somebody else has your passport doesn’t prove that he did a bombing.
DANA: On to the handwriting comparisons – which French lawyers described as their smoking gun.
French police deduced that the bomber had stayed at the Hotel Celtic in Paris a few nights before the attack.
They found the hotel registration card he filled out while he was there… with five words written on it: Larnaca, Cyprus, Technician. And Alexander Panadriyu (the fake name the attacker was using).
French investigators hired two experts to see if the writing on this hotel card matched some samples of Hassan Diab’s writing. Their conclusion: The handwriting was a match.
But they ran into problems.
It turns out the samples they’d analysed weren’t just of Hassan Diab’s handwriting. There was also a PhD application in there – written by somebody else.
DON BAYNE: When Doctor Diab applied for his PhD at Syracuse, he didn’t actually write out the application his former partner did.
DANA: Nawal Copty, his ex-wife, wrote that application for him – because, Hassan told us, her English was stronger.
This sent the French investigators back to the drawing board. They hired another expert – and gave her Hassan Diab’s real handwriting this time.
She also concluded that Hassan’s writing matched the hotel card.
But Don Bayne was suspicious. These analysts had been hired by the French. So he wanted more opinions.
And he lined up four additional experts to review their work.
DON BAYNE: And from that, most of the handwriting experts that we went to around the world – the US, the UK, Canada, Switzerland – said you can’t possibly identify anybody’s handwriting from that limited sample of block printing.
ALEX: I spoke to one of these experts – his name is John Osborn. Fun fact: He’s the great grandson of Albert S. Osborn – the guy who basically invented the entire field of handwriting analysis.
John dug up the old case file and looked back over his review of the handwriting analysis used against Hassan Diab.
In his report, he calls the French’s analysis, quote, ‘totally unreliable’.
And he wasn’t alone. The three other forensic experts criticised the analysis too.
One of them went as far as to say it was ‘fatally biassed and lacked objective reliability and accuracy’.
MUSIC
Chapter 3: Bernie starts to change his mind
ALEX: As the extradition case in Canada dragged on for years, Bernie Farber – the Jewish community leader in Ottawa – continued to show up to the hearings.
He watched from the spectator’s section as Don Bayne made his arguments against the French evidence.
BERNIE: There were 2 or 3 key pieces of evidence that not only didn’t add up, was just. I mean, I just couldn’t believe it.
ALEX: And a few years into the hearings, he started to feel differently about what he was seeing.
BERNIE: It began to hit me like a dull anvil. You know for me… it came to a point where I just couldn’t believe that people didn’t understand that this, that this was not the guy.
ALEX: Eventually, he changed his mind about Hassan Diab. And wanted to let others know.
BERNIE: Really you don’t need to be Inspector Clouseau to figure out what’s going on here.
ALEX: So he called up his friend and political science professor Mira Sucharov to ask if she would co-author an article about the case.
BERNIE: I left the courtroom and I called her and I said, this was not the guy. And that was the first time that I said it out loud. I, you know, obviously I thought about it, and it churned inside me. But when I spoke to Mira, that was the first time I said it out loud. And saying it out loud makes it even that much more devastating.
ALEX: Bernie Farber and Mira Sucharov published an opinion piece in The Toronto Star advocating for Hassan Diab’s innocence. It was titled “Ottawa must seek justice for Hassan Diab.”
Not everyone agreed with them.
BERNIE: We are a community that has suffered tremendously. And this bombing of the synagogue was devastating for the community. And when I, as a leader of the community, said: this is not our man, there were some very angry people.
ALEX: Bernie Farber has spent his life as a public campaigner. He’s used to getting pushback when he speaks out.
But this time, he was really going out on a limb.
BERNIE: In the heart of my hearts, 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 that I played a role in having people believe that he was a guilty party. Had I not spoken out, I’m not sure I could have lived with myself properly.
MUSIC
I made a mistake. In our own Jewish tradition, we are told that in order to be forgiven for these kinds of situations, you have to do what is known as teshuvah. And teshuvah means basically, standing up and admitting that you were wrong, admitting why you were wrong, and asking for forgiveness.
MUSIC
Chapter 4: The supporters
DANA: Bernie Farber wasn’t the only one paying close attention to Hassan Diab’s extradition hearings.
More people were following the case, and growing increasingly concerned.
A grassroots support group formed and started meeting weekly.
DANA: I want to go around and get everyone’s names…
DANA: And all these years later, they’re still going strong.
While I was in Ottawa, I tagged along to one of their meetings.
The venue was the common room of a retirement home where one of the support group members lived.
At first, it was hard to know who was there for the Hassan Diab support group and who was there for the free coffee.
Eventually, the free coffee people shuffled out and 12 members of the group sat in a semicircle. Hassan was in the middle. 6 people to his left, 6 to his right.
LINDA: My name is Linda Green.
MAEVE: My name is Maeve McMahon.
DANA: Most of the people in this room are above the age of 60.
IDA: My name is Ida Henderson.
JO: Jo Wood.
RHEA: Rhea Hainen.
DANA: Most are women.
JENNY: I’m Jenny Hornsey.
IDA: I’m here to support Hassan
BESSA: My name is Bessa Whitmore.
IDA: I’ve been doing this for 15 years too…
DANA: And all are big fans of Hassan.
RHEA: See how courageous he is
MAEVE: He’s a really nice guy. He’s a great cook. He’s very sociable. [fade down]
DANA: The group members joined for various reasons.
LINDA: My son was a student at Carleton, and he heard about it, and he called me. He told me about it, mum, he says, this doesn’t make any sense.
BESSA: Here was an opportunity to walk my talk to say: I’m not going to be silent in the face of injustice.
DANA: But what brought them together was a shared outrage over what was happening to Hassan.
IDA: I mean, I do think that it’s happening to Hassan, Number one, his name is Hassan Diab, not John Smith. He wasn’t born in, you know, Toronto or Ottawa. And there was definitely that element to it. And that just totally rubs me the wrong way.
beat
DANA: What struck me most was that in this room, there was absolute conviction that Hassan is innocent.
DANA: Did any of you ever waver in your belief that Hassan is innocent?
JO: Not since I first met him.
LINDA: Not since I heard about the case.
DANA: Never occurred to you that he might not be innocent?
JO: He hates extremism in all its forms. He doesn’t care who’s being extreme. That’s something he wants nothing to do with.
DANA: Now, Hassan was in the room when I asked this – so that might have swayed their answers. But they seemed sincere, truly devoted to his cause.
MUSIC
Throughout the extradition hearings, Hassan’s support group did everything they could to pressure the Canadian government to refuse the extradition.
They circulated petitions, held press conferences, they wrote opinion pieces…
Part of their mission, they told us, was keeping this case in the public eye.
But one subset of the Hassan Diab Support Group went even further.
RAGING GRANNIES: I think it’s too high.
Speaker1: Too high.
Speaker2: We do better when we just guess at it I think.
DANA: These are the Raging Grannies. And they protest in the most unique ways.
RAGING GRANNIES: There is a Canadian named Hassan Diab in a nightmare he is caught.
For decades, these women have been protesting in favour of everything from environmental protections to women’s rights. Shortly after Hassan’s arrest in 2008, his case landed on their radar too.
RAGING GRANNIES: There is no proof that he was there when the horrendous crime took place. In fact, his proof that he was in Beirut. So there really is no case.
DANA: During Hassan’s extradition hearings, the Raging Grannies stood outside the courtroom in full costume. Dresses with bold patterns, hats covered in pins, bright scarves
JENNA: I’m putting on some beads right now. So. Mardi Gras beads. That’s actually. I put on my granny skirt and my hat and my scarf and all these other things.
DANA: Is the point is to look colourful?
JENNA: Colourful and outrageous. And, hey, we’re here to make a point.
And they definitely made their point across Ottawa and beyond
RAGING GRANNIES: Extradition should never happen in the face of counter-proof. While he was writing exams in Beirut, the Paris bomber blew the roof.
MUSIC
Chapter 5: Hassan on bail
ALEX: Throughout the extradition hearings, Hassan was out of detention – on strict bail conditions.
In order to be released, he had to raise enough money to guarantee the Canadian authorities that he wouldn’t flee the country. Friends, family and supporters chipped in.
These people were called “sureties”. Nour Al Kadri was one of them.
NOUR: And a surety would be somebody, that will commit money, in such a way that if Hassan does not respect his bail conditions, that we would lose that money. And they were asking for a surety of $350,000.
ALEX: Woah. Okay.
ALEX: Quick fact check here – it was $335,000 Canadian dollars. Still. A lot of money. Especially to put up in support of a guy who many people considered a terrorist.
ALEX: That’s a lot of money.
NOUR: And he said, like, well, we could do this against our houses or mortgages. So, I said, okay, well, I’m willing to put 100,000 on my house in a mortgage. A lot of friends would call me in the family and say, okay, well, what are you putting yourself into? Why are you doing that?
ALEX: What made you so sure that Hassan wasn’t gonna mess up and lose your money?
NOUR: Okay, well, sometimes when you speak to somebody, you sense that. He was confident, day one, when he was detained, that he’s innocent. I felt sure deep inside I trusted my gut feelings that this is an innocent man.
DANA: The rest of the bail was split between four other sureties.
But even while out of prison, living his life at home, Hassan Diab faced strict conditions.
For instance, he had to remain inside his house between 9pm and 7am each day.
HASSAN: When you wake up in the morning, you start thinking of, well, is it 7:00 now? Because I want to drop the garbage out in the thing. You know, I’m waiting just to see, to make it seven, because they might be outside the door. Who knows?
DANA: Another condition was that he had to stay within a confined perimeter in Ottawa.
He could go to his favourite hiking spot in Gatineau Park, but one wrong turn along the way might risk putting him back in jail.
Hassan also wasn’t allowed to be alone – ever – except to go to the bathroom. If he went out to eat, or to the supermarket – one of his sureties needed to be with him at all times. Often, Nour Al Kadri would take up that responsibility.
NOUR: Yes, I was one of five who was supposed to be with him if his wife had to leave the house, so if she had to go and teach a class in the evening, I had to be there. If she wanted to take a vacation, for instance, I had to be with him.
HASSAN: So it was extremely difficult. First, you don’t work anymore. You are under surveillance. And if you need to do anything, you need to call someone.
DANA: Being out on bail came with another price tag. Hassan had to cover the cost of his GPS ankle bracelet – around $2000 dollars a month, he said.
His support group chipped in for that too – since Hassan lost his job.
HASSAN: Carleton University terminated my contract. While I was still teaching. They didn’t tell me. They put it in my mailbox, the termination letter.
DANA: And all of this also came with a constant state of paranoia.
HASSAN: Oh, it’s like you sleep, you see all the things around you. You look around you, who’s now behind me, who’s taping. Who’s wiretapping?
You know, it’s hard to explain because it’s hard to live it. It’s hard to describe what you go through.
MUSIC
DANA: In the meantime, the extradition hearings dragged on for years.
And the support group’s work started to pay off.
ARCHIVE: Chanting ‘Stop the extradition’
HASSAN: Now there was a change in the atmosphere because people came to support me.
ALEX: As the case drew to a close, the public narrative started to change.
ARCHIVE: We are here today to say that in the case of Hassan Diab, we will not allow the rubber stamping of the extradition, because the extradition is unjust…
HASSAN: And then the story started taking a different shape.
ARCHIVE (NEWSREEL): As the Ontario superior court inches closer towards a final decision in the extradition case of Hassan Diab, public pressure intensifies…
Chapter 6: The verdict
ALEX: The extradition hearings ended in June 2011.
They took around 80 days in court over two years, making this one of the longest extradition hearings in Canada’s history.
On the final day, the judge was set to announce his decision.
Bernie Farber was convinced – Hassan Diab was about to be vindicated.
BERNIE: I thought, okay, now the judge is going to make things right, because that’s what judges are supposed to do.
ALEX: In his statement, the judge made clear he was not impressed with the evidence the French had put forward.
BERNIE: Basically said: there’s not a case here.
ALEX: Just as Hassan Diab’s legal team had hoped, the judge said it was a quote “weak case” … “replete with seemingly disconnected information”.
And that the handwriting analysis was quote “soft science” that was “highly susceptible to criticism and impeachment”.
In point after point, the judge agreed with Hassan Diab’s lawyer – that the French case against him was terribly flawed.
BERNIE: And then he said, but…
There’s nothing that I can do about it.
MUSIC
ALEX: Even though the judge had serious doubts about most of the evidence.
He couldn’t completely discredit the handwriting analysis.
In his words, it was, quote, “convoluted, very confusing, with conclusions that are suspect”.
But it was enough to tip the scale.
BERNIE: The law does not permit me to find anything other than this.
ALEX: His hands were tied.
France’s lawyers had met a very low bar for extradition.
MUSIC
BERNIE: That hit me like a brick. I was really pissed. I really was. More at myself than anyone else. I felt partially responsible for that. And it’s one of those moments in my life that I regret, will always regret. And I find it hard sometimes to forgive myself.
DANA: The judge’s decision was a massive blow to Hassan Diab and his supporters.
They filed several appeals to no avail. Eventually, the legal team tried a hail mary.
They asked Canada’s Supreme Court to review the case – hoping for a different outcome.
ARCHIVE: Hassan Diab supporters here at the Supreme Court of Canada and of course Diab himself who is currently in the Regional Detention Center received some bad news minutes ago.
The Supreme Court will not hear his appeal against extradition and it now seems inevitable that he will be taken to France…
MUSIC
This is the end of the Canadian chapter of a 6 year legal odyssey for Diab.
DANA: On November 13 2014, the Supreme Court declined to hear Hassan Diab’s appeal.
There was nothing he or his lawyers or supporters could do.
Maeve McMahon [MC-MAN] was there that day, with others from the support group.
MAEVE MCMAHON: So we’re just there. Shivering. Supreme Court’s not going to hear it. So now we know he’s going to be extradited. And it was just like the energy level… It was already low. But this drop of energy and people just… looking at their feet and walking away. It was just devastating.
RHEA: We just held on to each other. And we were crying. Crying all day. It was so crazy. It was so unreal.
LINDA: How could anything like this happen to somebody like him?
DANA: You’re getting a bit emotional…
LINDA: I am, I am, yeah. No, it was hard to watch.
BESSA: We all held on to each other and cried and were determined to continue. And absolutely, this was not going to be the end of the situation. We were going to fight it all the way.
MUSIC
DANA: Hassan Diab heard the news from the detention centre, where he was being held as the Supreme Court decision was announced.
HASSAN: I heard the decision from the lawyer. I called the lawyer and he said the Supreme Court didn’t consider the case. Therefore you will be extradited.
DANA: The next day, he was put on a plane to France.
His daughter was about to turn two, and his wife Rania was pregnant with their second child.
He requested to see them one more time before his extradition. But this never happened.
HASSAN:. He, the lawyer, arranged to bring the family to the cell before I go to France. And I didn’t see the family. No. At night, they put me on the plane, and here we go. It’s like… you feel, or you wish if the plane goes down, I don’t care anymore now.
MUSIC
DANA: This may have been the worst day of Hassan Diab’s life. But for the victims of the Copernic synagogue bombing, it was a day of relief.
It had been 34 years since the attack, and now – finally – France’s main suspect was on his way to Paris for further investigation, and a possible trial.
I asked investigative judge Marc Trevidic – the man responsible for turning the case around – about this moment.
DANA: So how did it feel, after six years in 2014 to have Hassan Diab in France, finally?
TREVIDIC: Yes. I must admit that I was happy. So it was a Saturday. I can remember that. And all the policemen who dealt with the case were very happy, very excited, etc. And I say, no, be careful. It’s just the beginning. It’s not the end for us.
ALEX: Coming up, on the Copernic Affair…
ALEX NEVE: Days turned into weeks, which turned into months of him languishing.
HASSAN: You are in a constant state of hallucination, You can’t close your eyes. You sleep while your eyes are open.
TREVIDIC: I was obliged to leave. That’s all.
ANNETTE: When you are following this trial, you know that he’s guilty.
NAWAL: One of them kept looking at me and I think they may have even screamed, you are a liar or something.
ORON: And we think that at least some justice was done, and it is a move in the right direction.
Credits
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 Jonathan Najarian, and Chris Cobb, former reporter at the Ottawa Citizen, for sharing his experiences of reporting on Hassan Diab’s extradition hearing.
