Back in Canada, Hassan Diab’s life is hanging in limbo. He may be arrested at any moment, and Canada’s government won’t ensure his safety. What does justice mean for the victims of the Copernic attack, and what does it mean for Diab and his supporters?
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DANA: Last time, on the Copernic Affair…
HASSAN: 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.
DANA: Hassan Diab was extradited to France and sent to one of Europe’s most notorious prisons, on the outskirts of Paris.
HASSAN: The guards in France would ask me sometimes, you know, why you talk to me and you don’t look me in the eye? I said because I don’t see you. You don’t exist.
DANA: He was held there for more than a year awaiting trial.
Then – a twist of fate.
HASSAN: Bang! They changed the judge.
DANA: Two new judges were assigned to re-investigate his case.
HASSAN: And I said, guys, I will give you a chance. I will talk to you. I hope you’re not biassed. And I talked to them.
ALEX: And by the end of their years-long investigation, they ruled there was insufficient evidence to keep him detained.
After more than three years in a French prison, without ever standing trial, Hassan Diab was released. For him, and his supporters, this was a day to celebrate.
ALEX NEVE: And it’s one of those moments in my decades of human rights work that I’ll never forget, one of those precious moments where you have a sense of victory, a sense of jubilation.
ALEX: But for the victims of the Copernic synagogue attack, the French authorities had made a terrible mistake.
They felt like they’d been so close to finding justice. And now that closure had been snatched away from them.
ORON: Why, after so many years of attempting to extradite him, suddenly they just let him go, and this is it, he is back in Canada. It was definitely disappointing.
ALEX: But the case wasn’t over.
ALEX NEVE: We all, I think really felt like that was the end. I think there was this sense of confidence that, surely now, no matter what continued to happen in the French legal system, everything was now going to go in his favour… And how wrong we were.
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Chapter 1: Hassan Diab is free
DANA: I’m Dana Ballout.
ALEX: I’m Alex Atack.
DANA: And this is the final episode of the Copernic Affair.
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DANA: Hassan Diab’s return to Canada in January 2018 was the beginning of a period of relative stability for him and his family.
His daughter was five and his son, who he’d only ever met a couple of times during prison visits, was nearly three.
After a few months he returned to his old job – teaching in the sociology department at Carleton University.
But his mental state had taken a considerable hit, physically, he was back in his home, eating at his own table, sleeping in his own bed.
But in his mind, he was still back in France. Stuck in the routine that prison had imposed on him.
HASSAN: I spent the first nine months where I didn’t know what was going on. Every morning, waiting for the cell to open, the door of the cell. And I kept,, waiting and oh, they are coming. They are there. And uh, that was the first year, practically. I was still there.
DANA: He’d wake up in the middle of the night – terrified – for no obvious reason – worried that his kids were being kidnapped.
Old friends – like Don Pratt, who’d known Hassan for decades – noticed this change.
DON: I think it’s affected him in profound yet subtle ways. I think he’s adopted a kind of looking over your shoulder feeling all the time, like he’s always on guard, that shit’s going to go down. He’s not quite as vivacious and, you know, fun loving as he used to be. He’s a lot more, I think, muted.
ALEX: This was the psychological toll of the past decade.
The battle raging inside Hassan’s head.
And then there was everything happening on the outside.
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ARCHIVE (NEWSREEL): A former Ottawa professor who spent three years in a French prison is back home.
ARCHIVE (NEWS ANCHOR): Glad you’re back in Canada?
ARCHIVE (HASSAN): Oh, very much…
ARCHIVE (NEWS ANCHOR): What was it like in the airport…
He was stopped in the streets by people who’d seen his face on TV.
There were press conferences. Media interviews. Meetings with politicians.
ARCHIVE (PRESS CONFERENCE): I’m in the process of reintegrating here, an ordinary life… For the future I don’t have any specific plans…
ALEX: He questioned every new person he met – and trusted none of them. Constantly wondering what new danger could be lurking around the corner.
HASSAN: And you have always you look around and you see sometimes even funky people looking at you in a funky way, you feel like, uh oh, who’s this now? Nobody is innocent. No one.
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DANA: It turned out – his paranoia was justified.
Early in 2018, a team of prosecutors in France, along with lawyers representing the victims and their families, launched an appeal to overturn the decision that granted Hassan Diab his freedom.
And a new cycle of legal proceedings started right back up again.
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Chapter 2: In France, the case is appealed
ALEX: While I was in Paris about a year ago, my colleague Catherine and I took a train to the outskirts of the city.
We had an appointment in the main courthouse in Paris – to meet one of the prosecutors behind the appeal.
After a bag check we were let through into a tall, bright atrium, and were taken upstairs into a waiting room.
A few minutes later, Benjamin Chambre stepped in.
He’s a vice prosecutor in France’s national anti-terrorism unit.
And he was much younger than I thought he’d be. Sharp grey suit and a trimmed beard.
He was also friendlier than I’d expected.
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We’d tried to set up interviews with as many people as we could in France.
Many had declined. Some had cancelled on us at the last minute.
And the whole time I was in Paris, I had this feeling that some people were suspicious of us. Like, why were two foreign journalists asking questions about this particular case? But Benjamin Chambre was willing to get into it with us.
He smiled apologetically for being a couple of minutes late. And guided us into a big conference room, empty except for a table, some chairs – and a big stack of documents.
ALEX: So…could you just introduce yourself?
BENJAMIN: Je m’appelle Benjamin Chambre…
ALEX: Benjamin Chambre first got involved in this case when French prosecutors and the victims’ lawyers appealed the previous judges’ decision to release Hassan Diab.
BENJAMIN: [speaking French]
CATHERINE: So his role as the general advocate is to represent society is to represent the French state and the French society. So they were asked to look at it with completely fresh eyes
DANA: There was nothing different in the case file these prosecutors were looking at. No new evidence had come to light.
But – as we’ve learned throughout our reporting – this case is like one of those optical illusions where some people look at the image and see a vase, others will see two silhouettes in profile.
In the Copernic case, evidence that had once been dismissed as insignificant or unreliable by one judge, became credible, even enlightening, to another.
ALEX: In January 2021 – three years after Hassan Diab was released from French prison – The appeals court sided with Chambre, and the victims’ lawyers. And delivered their judgement: there was enough evidence for the case to go to trial .
The problem was… by this point, Hassan Diab was back in Canada.
He was asked by prosecutors to return to France and attend the trial. But he refused.
HASSAN: Many people told me, why don’t you go to France and meet the judges and fix it and come back, if you have nothing? I said no because they would put me in jail for a good time.
ALEX: And without another extradition order, he was under no obligation to cooperate.
HASSAN: I was in France for more than three years, and I told my story to the professional judges, not to the circus, media style trial and court. If it wasn’t enough. I don’t think they will be satisfied.
ALEX: The professional judges Hassan is referring to here are Jean-Marc Herbaut and Richard Foltzer, the ones who dismissed his case in 2018.
This new trial in 2023, included new judges who he believed didn’t know the case as well as Herbaut and Foltzer.
HASSAN: I’m not going to spend my life pleasing this and that. That’s my answer.
ALEX: To the victims of the attack and the prosecutors, this was unacceptable. Even cowardly. From their perspective, if Hassan Diab says he’s innocent, then why not prove that in a court?
Benjamin Chambre was frustrated.
BENJAMIN: [speaking French]
CATHERINE: He says that it was a real disgrace that Hassan Diab didn’t come to court. And that represented a sort of exception in French courtrooms. Normally that wouldn’t be allowed to happen.
BENJAMIN: [speaking French]
CATHERINE: He says that he would have liked to have seen what witnesses would have said upon seeing his face in front of them. He would have liked to ask him questions to sort of clear up certain things that they weren’t able to discover during the trial.
ALEX: But – it had taken six years to extradite Hassan Diab the first time.
According to Marc Trevidic, one of the previous investigative judges, French authorities didn’t want to wait that long, again, to bring him back to France. So they proceeded without him…
Hassan Diab would be tried in absentia.
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Chapter 3: The trial begins
DANA: At what point were you called or asked or decided to participate in the trial?
NAWAL: The prosecutor decided to call me. So I was considered on the prosecutor’s witness list.
DANA: Hassan Diab’s ex-wife, Nawal Copty, was among the handful of people who said they remembered him being in Beirut around the time of the Copernic synagogue attack.
She received a letter requesting her presence at a Paris court for Hassan Diab’s trial – scheduled to take place in April 2023.
He was accused of murder, attempted murder and organised destruction of property in connection with a terrorist enterprise.
Nawal Copty told us she knows Hassan Diab is innocent. She’d already made that clear during an earlier trip to Paris, when she was interviewed by the previous set of investigative judges.
So, in 2023, when she was asked to answer questions about the case again – this time, in front of a courtroom, she knew she would do it.
DANA: Was that like an immediate decision or did you have to think about that?
NAWAL: No, I didn’t have to think about that. No, it was, yeah, I think it was important for me to go and say what I know about Hassan and tell them the facts. I was feeling that this injustice, this whole nightmare has been going on for too far.
DANA: For the second time, she bought and booked a flight to France. Her husband Don Pratt – who by now had also spent years campaigning for Hassan Diab’s innocence – travelled with her.
DANA: More than 20 victims of the attack, and their families, were also in Paris for the trial.
Oron Shagrir, whose mother Aliza was killed by the explosion, was among them.
ORON: Yeah, they invited me. And for me it was also very emotional to meet the other families there. We formed like a sort of a community. Some of the injured people, some of the people whose relatives were killed in the attack.
We all felt, I think, that after so many years, at last, someone takes this attack more seriously, and finally, we have some sort of procedures.
DANA: One of the victims of the attack described the feeling like being isolated on an island along with the only other people in the world who could understand what you’ve been through – other victims.
And now, they were all together. Hoping the trial would bring them justice.
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ARCHIVE (NEWSREEL): On Monday, France’s top court put Hassan Diab on trial in connection with a 43 year old bomb attack outside a Paris synagogue…
ARCHIVE (NEWSREEL): [speaking French]
ALEX: The trial took place at a centuries old courthouse on the river Seine, a stone’s throw from Notre-Dame.
DON: It seemed like a place that had seen many, many, many trials over the years.
ALEX: Nawal Copty and Don Pratt arrived, and navigated their way through the hallways to the courtroom.
NAWAL: So you had wooden benches in the front part. 85% of the courtroom was taken over by people on the prosecution side.
DON: There were some journalists who had reserved seating somewhat closer to the front. There were quite a few people dressed in the robes. So you knew they were lawyers.
ALEX: Don and Nawal were the only people there in person to testify on Hassan Diab’s behalf.
DON: It was just us. Just the two of us.
ALEX: So for the most part, Hassan Diab’s case was argued by his French lawyer – William Bourdon.
He said that from the very beginning, he anticipated fighting an uphill battle with this trial.
WILLIAM BOURDON: [speaking French]
CATHERINE: It seemed like he had already been judged guilty from the start, before the trial had even begun.
And so he said that when he took on the case, he realised that he had to start right from the beginning and show how all of the elements of evidence against him weren’t sufficient.
ALEX: Over the course of three weeks, the court heard a lot of testimonies.
From police officers who originally investigated the attack.
JACQUES: J’ai témoigné de manière très très objective, très. Je n’aime pas les policiers qui. Qui sont accusateurs dans leur témoignage.
CATHERINE: I testified in the trial. I tried to be as objective as possible. I don’t like it when police officers or investigators, they have a personal opinion that they show, particularly in a trial situation.
DANA: The court heard from witnesses – who’d crossed paths with the suspect in the days leading up to the bombing.
ALEX: And, from victims – who told the court how much pain this attack had inflicted.
ORON: So they asked me to tell the story of my mother, how she was killed and how the terror attack impacted our family.
ALEX: Patricia Barbe, the daughter of Jean-Michel Barbé, the driver who was killed in the attack, read an emotional letter addressed to her father.
He was killed before she turned 16.
DANA: Rabbi Michael Williams took the stand and recalled his memories of the day – and the devastation it left behind among families of the victims.
He shared with the court that the parents of Philippe Bouissou, the 22-year-old motorcyclist who was killed on his way to see his fiance – visited the Copernic synagogue every year on the anniversary of the attack to pray with the congregation.
ALEX: Gérald Barbier, was 28 when the bomb was detonated – right next to his parents’ electrical appliance shop.
His mother was injured and he said shards of glass from the explosion remained in her body until the day she died.
In his testimony he said “I’m not Jewish, but I’m with them. They are the primary victims. I’m just a collateral victim.”
DANA: Corinne Adler also took the stand.
She was 13 years old at the time and was celebrating her Bat Mitzvah the night of the bombing.
Her siblings, parents, friends from school, and grandparents who had travelled from Israel were all there to celebrate with her.
In the aftermath of the bombing, she started to lose her eyebrows due to stress and spent decades coping with her violent entry into adulthood.
DANA: The court also heard from experts on terrorism, explosives, Palestinian militia groups, handwriting analysis, and psychology…
ALEX: From journalists who had covered the story over the years
DANA: From Hassan Diab’s ex-partners and friends, who testified by video.
ALEX: From intelligence officers and investigating judges – including Marc Trévidic.
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TREVIDIC: I did my job. They have the file and I’m not here to give an opinion. I’m not here to tell the court what they must do with my job.
DANA: Were you quite convinced that Hassan Diab was guilty?
TREVIDIC: I’m sorry. I’m not going to tell you that. There is a separation, total separation between an investigating judge and judgement. I am well known in France, you know, as a judge. So, what I say of my opinion has weight. So I don’t want to use that. I never did that. Everybody knows the evidence. If judges think that it’s not enough, it’s not enough.
DANA: There was something else Marc Trédivic said during his questioning.
TREVIDIC: I have nothing against Hassan Diab, of course.
TREVIDIC: Hassan Diab wasn’t the main target of the case. The main target was in Lebanon. It was Salim Abu Salem, the chief of the group.
DANA: On the stand, Marc Trevidic said his primary target had been a Palestinian man named Salim Abu Salem – apparently the leader of the group who carried out the attack in 1980.
TREVIDIC: My main purpose was to have enough evidence against Salim Abu Salem. I prefer to catch the chief than the mouse.
DANA: Better to catch the chief than the mouse.
Which tells us something quite revelatory about this entire case.
This was never just about Hassan Diab. Remember those intelligence reports that named him as the bomber? They also named nine other people who were suspected of being involved in the Copernic attack.
Salim Abu Salim was one of them. We know he headed the PFLP-OS starting in 1979 and on. We tried to find out more, but information about him was sparse.
Over the years, French investigators pursued other people on the list as well – a woman named May al Arja in Chile, Marwan el Khatib, Abdullah Sobh, Sanaa Saleh all whose exact whereabouts were unknown – and there were others as well.
We tried to reach these people, too – we found out that some were dead, one didn’t answer our calls, and others seemed to have dropped off the grid.
ALEX: By the time Trévidic’s term as investigative judge was up, Abu Salem’s whereabouts were still a mystery.
TREVIDIC: It’s over. It’s over. The other members of the group, etcetera. It’s over because the investigations are over. So yeah. I would have appreciated to stay one or two years more in charge in Paris, and that’s all. We did our best, really, I think.
DANA: For French investigators, Hassan Diab just happened to be the only person who was alive and findable.
And who lived in a country that had an extradition agreement with France and a government willing to cooperate.
If he’d lived in almost any other country in the world… if he’d stayed living in Lebanon, for example, or the UAE, or Kuwait… it’s likely none of what we’ve told you in this podcast would have happened.
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ALEX: A few days after Marc Trevidic was questioned, it was Nawal Copty’s turn to take the stand.
NAWAL: When my turn came, they asked me to go into the courtroom and answer the questions. So I was standing in the front of the courtroom facing the judges.
ALEX: Nawal was asked about her relationship with Hassan Diab… about his passport, which was found with a member of the group who supposedly carried out the attack.
And, about the few weeks around the date of the bombing – when she says she remembers being with Hassan Diab in Beirut .
The court questioned why she hadn’t just offered this information up when she was first asked – back in 2008.
NAWAL: I felt that they were dismissing my answers. I felt that whatever I was saying didn’t register or they decided to ignore it.
DANA: How did you come to that conclusion? Like what – what do you mean?
NAWAL: I just felt that they were looking at me, going through the motions, but not really taking what I said into consideration. So, the fact that Hassan was in Lebanon at the time didn’t make a difference.
DANA: During your time there, did you meet any of the victims of the attack or their family members
NAWAL: Yes, because they were in the room. And they knew I was the witness, and they knew that I knew Hassan. So I got some unfriendly looks and some negative comments.
DANA: Nawal said one woman called her a liar.
She didn’t know the woman’s name, but in an interview we heard with French media, one of the victims, Isabelle Franck, told the journalist that she had approached Nawal and told her, quote: I know you’re religious. So you must know that lying is wrong. And the things you’re saying in that courtroom are not true.
We tried to reach Isabelle Franck through her lawyer, but the interview was declined.
NAWAL: Well, when they said that to me, I couldn’t say anything. I was silent because what am I to say… I mean, I feel their anger, their upset.
DANA: Did you get a chance to interact with any of the victims?
DON: I was very standoffish. I didn’t want to interact with people generally. One time when we were in line waiting to enter and go through the security, a lady who I knew was the daughter of one of the victims dropped her scarf and I picked it up and gave it to her.
And she was very gracious about receiving her scarf back. I thought, you know, under different circumstances, we could be friends, maybe. She seemed like a decent person, but obviously operating under a very different set of assumptions than me.
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ALEX: On the eighth day of the trial, Jean Marc Herbaut and Richard Foltzer – the judges who dismissed Hassan’s case for a lack of sufficient evidence – took the stand.
They basically reiterated what they’d written in their original 2018 report .
They reminded the court that authorities found a set of fingerprints on the same hotel registration card that they took a handwriting sample from, and another set on a car linked to the bombing.
Both were believed to have been left by the perpetrator. But they did not match Hassan Diab’s fingerprints.
It’s worth pausing on these fingerprints for a moment.
Because this trial in 2023 wasn’t the first time they’d come up.
French police had found the fingerprints in 2007 – but had failed to disclose them during Hassan Diab’s extradition hearings.
In fact, their record of the case from 2008 said that they, quote “did not discover any usable fingerprint traces.”
We put all this to Marc Trévidic.
He insisted that they didn’t know about the fingerprints when they submitted the record of the case to Canada.
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DANA: Over three weeks, prosecutors slowly picked their way through the case. Through all the evidence that had been collected over four decades – none of it new to this trial nor this podcast. Hassan Diab’s legal team presented counterarguments too. All of which we’ve also presented in this series.
And in a twist, the court dropped the handwriting analysis – the primary evidence once used to justify Hassan Diab’s extradition to France after they determined the comparisons were inconclusive.
For Oron Shagrir and many others in the courtroom, the collective evidence painted a clear picture of Hassan Diab as the perpetrator.
ORON: First of all, I think it was like the different pieces together. So you can say, well, you know, one well, you know, there is no DNA. We all know it. You could challenge every piece of it. But when they all come together, all evidence together comprises a very strong case against Diab.
ALEX: But to Nawal Copty, this picture of the man she had known for decades… the man she was once married to… was unfathomable.
NAWAL: I’m really sorry that this crime happened. It’s a terrible crime. But look at the evidence, and make sure that whoever is paying for this crime is the right person. And Hassan is not that person. The facts support this, I know him. Anybody who knows him supports this. So let’s try and make sure that whoever did this is the person who would be punished for this, but not an innocent man.
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Chapter 4: The verdict
ALEX: The decision in this 2023 trial was made by a panel of judges. We put in a request to speak to them, but they declined.
But the prosecutor, Benjamin Chambre, described to us how decisions are made in this kind of trial.
BENJAMIN: [speaking French]
CATHERINE: So in the court, there’s one president and four judges. After having heard the defence, all of the witnesses, everything, they then leave to discuss their own opinion on it. Then the president organises a vote, one on whether the suspect is guilty or not, and then the second one will be on his sentence. Then the court comes back, gives its decision, they listed all of their decisions and how they came to their decision in this 30-31 page document.
ALEX: On April 21st 2023, the court president and four judges convened in a room for a full day and voted.
ALEX: Was the vote unanimous?
BENJAMIN: [speaking French]
CATHERINE: So there’s this idea of secrecy within the court. So they can’t actually know that. So they know that it was a majority. They don’t know whether it was three judges against 2 or 4 against one, in any case a majority.
ALEX: Back in the courtroom, the Attorney General spoke for over an hour, as he read out the decision.
He started off by defining terrorism and explaining why this attack fell within that definition.
He spoke directly to the victims – recognized their pain and their trauma.
Then he praised Marc Trévidic and commended him for all the work he’d done on this case over the years.
DANA: Then he brought up Hassan Diab. Said it was shameful that he had refused to come to France to face trial.
And then, he went through all the evidence… and commented on the testimonies.
He noted Nawal’s testimony but discredited her answers, and said she was biassed because she and Hassan shared a past.
At one point, the attorney general needed to pause. He sat down and took a drink of water.
In the end, stated: “The exceptional seriousness of the events is reflected in the number of dead and injured, the target – a synagogue and its 320 worshippers, the organization put in place to carry out the attack – and the still vivid consequences for the victims who came to give evidence at the hearing, almost 43 years after the events.”
And then he read the verdict: Guilty.
The sentence: life imprisonment. And an immediate warrant for Hassan Diab’s arrest.
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ORON: So of course, we were very pleased, also, we, the families, had some WhatsApp or email, you know, correspondence. We were all very pleased about it. We think that at least some justice was done, and it is a move in the right direction.
And so for us the verdict itself was an important statement from the court that the victims here are those who are injured and killed, and they were killed in a terror attack that was aimed at French citizens who happen to be Jews, nothing else.
I mean, we of course would be very pleased to see Diab extradited and spend time in jail. But there is some sort of feeling of closure here.
ALEX: That evening, some of the victims of the attack gathered together at a cafe opposite the courthouse.
It wasn’t a celebration per se, more a chance to breathe a sigh of relief together.
After so many decades, the verdict had finally delivered them some closure.
NAWAL: Don and I, we sat in the courtroom. And we heard the negative judgement.
DON: I was disgusted with the outcome.
NAWAL: I was in shock. I just couldn’t do or say anything.
DON: I felt, on the other hand, it was anticlimactic because I figured this was determined at the outset.
ALEX: When I asked him about it, Hassan Diab’s lawyer, William Bourdon, sounded resigned, as well.
WILLIAM BOURDON: [speaking French]
CATHERINE: He said that when when the verdict came out, when he was sentenced to life in prison, he realised that in this kind of situation, it’s almost impossible for a lawyer to get their client exonerated, because the collective emotion around such a large event, the sort of national trauma after a terrorist attack, means that prosecutors have to look ruthless they have to find a culprit.
WILLIAM BOURDON: [speaking French]
CATHERINE: And the legitimate place of there being the victims as well, in the courtroom, that also puts on an added pressure. And so there is this kind of desire to have a culprit at any price. And it means that the judges will agree to find someone guilty on the basis of weak evidence in a way that they wouldn’t do in a different situation. And he thinks the sentence is unfounded, very easy to criticise, and he could see from the beginning of the trial that it was going to go like this.
ALEX: I put this to the prosecutor, Benjamin Chambre.
He rejected the idea that they were under any sort of political pressure to find Diab guilty – and insisted that everything followed the proper legal process.
DANA: But what struck us, talking to people who were there in court that day, is that none of them were completely satisfied with the verdict.
For Hassan Diab and his legal team, this was clearly not the decision they’d hoped for.
For the victims, the verdict offered no promise that the man found guilty would ever serve his sentence.
And the prosecutors, they had to deliver a sentence to an empty stand.
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Chapter 6: In limbo
ALEX: After the trial, Don Pratt and Nawal Copty returned home to California. Disappointed with the decision – but determined to keep fighting for their friend.
They both have day jobs but spend their evenings and weekends moonlighting as the organisers behind Hassan Diab’s support committee.
DON: In the beginning It was a 24/7 obsession. It was just all consuming. Over the years, it’s gradually changed so that I don’t think about it all the time, of course, but literally even after, what, 15 plus years, literally every day I take some time to do something related to the case.
DANA: Why?
DON: Because I feel we have to keep going. I think we have to keep struggling so that we can succeed, win whatever you want to call it.
ALEX: In this period of stasis, of uncertainty, with a guilty conviction, a life sentence from a French court hanging over Hassan Diab, and the anticipation of a future extradition request to return him to France, the support committee has taken on a secondary, more unofficial role.
DON PRATT: To some extent, the meetings are also just a chance to commiserate and just talk about the situation and remind ourselves of what’s happened over so many years. Hassan will sometimes, you know, actually take ten minutes to go off and say something about the situation with the handwriting or with the fingerprints. I think to some extent it’s a little bit of therapy for him to have those group meetings, because he can commiserate. We can all commiserate.
HASSAN: So you see these people you see you know they are still there for the last 15 years. Can you imagine 15 years? We still meet either once per week or twice. And, they give you some hope and wow, these people don’t give up.
So they remind you there’s something hopefully in this world, or as they say, Mahmoud Darwish; there’s something worthy on this land, on this earth.
ALEX: You can tell from speaking to Don Pratt and others in the support group, the case has taken a toll on them.
DON: Many of our folks, especially in Ottawa – the case has aged all of us, but some of them are really old now.
DANA: Hassan is older too, physically and emotionally impacted by all he’s been through. He remains vigilant, waiting for the next shoe to drop.
Still, he tries to enjoy the little things about his life in Ottawa.
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ALEX: Do you think of yourself as a happy person these days?
HASSAN: Well when I look at the kids, mostly I see myself as a happy person especially, you know, when we play football though, they are getting stronger than me especially Jenna is becoming super strong. I couldn’t beat her yesterday. She won against me at football, in the park. But Jad, I still can control him. I can win against him. So they make your life much nicer, much different too.
ALEX: When he’s not with his kids, Hassan fills his days with things he’s loved to do, since childhood… playing football, reading, hiking and swimming,
HASSAN: Sometimes I teach. Next semester. I’m teaching a course that is called social justice in action.
ALEX: Is that at Carleton?
HASSAN: At Carleton. In the fall.
ALEX: Would you say your life has gone back to normal?
HASSAN: No, never. You know, you can’t… Your brain has already been infested with everything you went through in the last 15, 16 years.
MUSIC
DANA: At the start of this series, we posed a question:
Is Hassan Diab guilty, responsible for bombing the Copernic street synagogue?
Or is he a scapegoat – convicted to bring closure to a decades-old crime widely seen as a stain on French history?
ALEX: By now, we’ve been working on this story for a year and a half.
We know what we’ve read – in all the documents and court records we could get our hands on.
We’ve been to Canada – and to France.
We’ve interviewed dozens of people – literally everyone who would talk to us.
We’ve told you which parts of the story we can verify – and which parts we can’t.
DANA: But there’s only one person who knows with absolute certainty if Hassan Diab is guilty or innocent. And we’ve spent hours talking to him.
He’s granted us multiple interviews without limitations on his time or on what questions we could ask.
ALEX: Hassan Diab’s answers to us have been consistent with the court records we’ve dug up and the other interviews we’ve conducted in the year and a half that we’ve spent working on this story.
And in the absence of any evidence that directly links him to the night of the attack, we can only come to a conclusion based on the evidence and testimonies available to us.
And – all these years later, the opinion of the Canadian judge who presided over his extradition hearing still seems correct; the evidence that was used to arrest Hassan Diab in 2008, and to extradite him in 2014 was circumstantial and weak.
DANA: But it was this same evidence that was used to convict him in 2023.
The only material evidence that was ever brought up in court – in nearly two decades – the fingerprints, and the handprint – were not a match for Hassan Diab.
ALEX: None of this means that Hassan Diab is innocent. It’s just hard to see how the evidence available adds to the conclusion – to the verdict – that he was guilty.
DANA: For the victims, this trial in 2023 did offer a sense – finally – that justice had prevailed.
But it did not close the book on the Copernic synagogue attack.
Because the debate rages on.
Hassan Diab is still in Canada. He’s convicted of murder, but living freely. A walking contradiction.
ALEX: Except that he isn’t free… not really.
His fate is inextricably tied to an unknowable question about where he was the night of October 3rd, 1980.
With an international warrant out for his arrest, Hassan Diab lives with the constant dread that another SWAT team will arrive outside his door.
And the fear that Canada will follow through on another request from France to extradite him.
He’d be right back at the start again.
HASSAN: So that’s the dilemma. And that’s the sword above your head, waiting to fall. That’s why I call it the limbo.
ARCHIVE: Consider the absurdity of Hassan Diab, a professor of social justice at Carleton university, who just so happens to be a convicted terrorist by France…
ARCHIVE: This is an unconscionable move from Carleton university in Ottawa…
ALEX: A few weeks before we recorded this episode, a Jewish advocacy group issued a statement, calling for Carleton University to terminate Hassan Diab’s teaching contract.
They wrote “The university’s decision to welcome a convicted terrorist onto its campus and into its classrooms is impossible to comprehend”.
This was the first time many people had heard about Hassan Diab. Some were outraged.
DANA: Global news headlines followed. Posts across social media.
A far-right media outlet hired a van to park at the edge of campus with a billboard that read: Hassan Diab, convicted of bombing a synagogue, teaching at Carleton University.
ARCHIVE: It’s a frosty morning and the students of Carleton University are filing in. And I was astonished to learn that one of the professors at Carleton is called Hassan Diab. He was convicted by a French court of terrorism…
DANA: At one point, an email dropped into Hassan Diab’s university inbox. He told us about it on a Zoom call.
HASSAN: The subject is ‘your day is close’. ‘We know exactly where you live and where you socialise. We also have full and detailed info of your family members. You have five days, i.e. 120 hours to return to France to stand trial. Otherwise, your life clock will start clocking at an unprecedented rate’.
ALEX: His lawyer advised him to call the police after this one. Which he did. They told him to stay alert. To lock his doors and windows. And to call 911 if anything happened.
DANA: In a matter of days, Hassan Diab’s life was again thrown into chaos. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who once stated that what happened to Hassan Diab never should have happened – is now completely silent on the matter. And soon, he’ll be out of office.
ALEX: But his political rival, Pierre Poilievre, the leader of Canada’s conservative party, has been anything but silent on Hassan Diab’s case.
He seized upon the angry media reports and posted on social media – saying quote “Why hasn’t he been extradited to France to face justice? Is Justin Trudeau refusing France’s extradition request?
DANA: Hassan Diab’s case has even caught the attention of Elon Musk – one of the most influential men in the world. In January, Musk reposted Polievre’s remarks, asking quote: “a mass murderer is living free as a professor in Canada?” More than 21 million people have seen that post.
Shortly after this, Carleton University stated publicly that Hassan Diab, who is a part-time professor, is no longer employed there, but when we contacted the chair of his department at Carleton, he told us: Hassan Diab was not terminated.
ALEX: Instead, his teaching contract was always due to end on December 31, 2024.
The chair also said that he can’t speak for Carleton University, but his department’s relationship with Hassan hadn’t changed – and he’s welcome to apply for contract positions in the future.
DANA: Pierre Poilievre is widely expected to replace Justice Trudeau as Prime Minister in the next election, which could be called at any time.
If he does become Prime Minister and France pursues a second extradition request, his government will have the final say on it.
HASSAN: And I have just to be careful. I look around the street, who’s who. You know, it’s like you are living in this constant fear, like who will jump from a tree, sometimes I look at the trees up there or the bushes or where I go to do my jogging in the morning. So I have to change path and stuff like that.
DANA: If he is extradited, and even though he was already convicted in absentia, Hassan Diab would face another trial in France.
HASSAN: It’s not easy. It’s, you know… it’s like waiting for the for the ghost to appear from somewhere.
MUSIC
ALEX: For some of those who believe Hassan Diab is guilty, the knowledge he’s living in limbo like this – is at least a small consolation.
DANA: But for Hassan Diab – six years of extradition hearings under strict bail conditions, more than three years of prison time and nearly two decades of campaign efforts have amounted to this: Not freedom… nor a return to how things were in the past.
And all because of a crime he maintains he had nothing to do with.
ALEX: At this point even some of his most strident supporters – like Don Pratt – have lost hope that this will just be resolved for good… that they’ll all get to move on one day.
DON PRATT: Our big concern is a change in government and finding that the political will is there now to appease the French. You know, realizing that they’ve made a terrible mistake? We’ve kind of given up on that.
ALEX: Now, their role is to be persistent and to do everything they can to stop things from getting any worse for Hassan Diab. But of course – this is out of their control.
DON PRATT: We’re going to have this thing till the day we die. It’s just never going to go away. The case will bury us all.
CREDITS
ALEX: Thank you for listening to the Copernic Affair. We’ll be following this story as it continues, and we hope to bring you updates in the future.
This series was 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.
