The Principle Is The Issue?
The Principle Is The Issue?
It seems that Amnesty International, the Canadian Civil Liberties Association and the B.C. Civil Liberties Association have isolated two issues; one, the issue of guilt or innocence; two, the issue of due process. In the former issue they are not competent to judge nor do they have an opinion, in the latter they are addressing an issue that seems fairly clear to them, that of protesting that evidence in the hands of the French justice system purporting to implicate Lebanese-Canadian academic Hassan Diab, may have been obtained through torture.Much time has elapsed since four people were killed and many more seriously injured outside the Union Libérale Israélite de France synagogue on rue Copernic in Paris in 1980. The case was re-opened in 2007 and evidence assembled that appeared to French prosecutors to implicate a former Ottawa and Carleton university lecturer, Hassan Diab, who claims himself to be innocent of any such charges. His name, he has asserted, is a common one; he has been mistaken for someone else.
An RCMP swat team, responding to the request for extradition by France of the suspect they felt was involved in the 1980 Paris synagogue bombing, raided Mr. Diab's Gatineau apartment on November 13, 2008. French authorities would like Mr. Diab, a Canadian citizen, to stand trial for murder and attempted murder in the rue Copernic blast. Initially he spent a few months in prison, and since then has worn a GPS tracking device while free on bail.
On Oct. 3, 1980, a bomb blast killed four people at a Jewish synagogue on Rue Copernic in Paris.
A
file photo shows firefighters standing next to cars destroyed following
a bomb attack at the rue Copernic synagogue in Paris that killed four
people. French daily newspaper Le Figaro reported October 11, 2007 that
French police have identified a 55 year-old Palestinian man now living
in Canada as the suspected perpetrator of the 1980 bomb attack. The man,
who was not named in the report, was traced after German intelligence
officials acquired a memebership list of the now-defunct extremist
group, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.
This
file photo dated October 3, 1980 shows a rabbi speaking with a
journalist after a bomb attack at a Paris synagogue rue Copernic killing
four people. Canadian police confirmed on November 13, 2008 the arrest
in Gatineau, near Ottawa, Canada, of a man suspected to be involved in
the 1980 bomb attack rue Copernic.
Mr.
Diab objects, strenuously. Ontario Superior Court Justice Robert
Maranger heard from a number of expert hand-writing witnesses engaged
for the defence in 2011 that in their professional opinion they felt
that the evidence against Mr. Diab based on a French handwriting
expert's analysis, was flawed. And though Judge Maranger heard these
arguments with considered sympathy, he ruled that Canadian extradition
law urged upon him a decision to agree to extradition.
He
also ruled that Canadian federal prosecutors had presented sufficient
evidence to satisfy the order against Mr. Diab. In response to which
Justice Minister Rob Nicholson made the decision to comply with the
French request for extradition. While the handwriting sample purporting
to implicate Mr. Diab is held to be suspect in some quarters, it does
not represent the only piece of evidence held to presumably implicate
him.
Some
evidence was also acquired through German intelligence linking a man by
the name of Hassan Diab to the terrorist group The Popular Front for
the Liberation of Palestine, an extremist offshoot of the Palestine
Liberation Organization, and partner of its Fatah political wing, now
represented by the Palestinian Authority under President Mahmoud Abbas.
Labels: Canada, Crime, France, Justice, Palestinians, Terrorism
posted by Pieface @ Friday, July 05, 2013
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