Terrorism suspect extradited to France
FR ANCE HAS started legal proceedings against a man suspected of the 1982 attack on a kosher Paris restaurant in which six people were killed and dozens were wounded. Walid Abdurahman Abu Zayed, who has spent the last three decades in Norway, was extradited on Friday.
It was lunch time in Goldenberg’s iconic restaurant in Paris’ historic Jewish quarter on 9 August 1982 when between three and five terrorists threw a hand grenade into the packed room and fired their automatic weapons at the crowd. The killers then ran up Rosiers Street, shooting at passers-by, escaping through narrow streets.
Abu Zayed is suspected of being one of the shooters. He swears he has never set foot in France.
The attack was attributed to Palestinian group the Abu Nidal Organisation that had split from Yasser Arafat’s Fatah. The killers fired Polish weapons often used by Palestinian terrorist cells.
For more than two decades, nothing surfaced from the investigation.
Former intelligence chief Yves Bonnet revealed in 2018 that, after the attack, he sealed a deal with Abu Nidal, vowing not to prosecute its members and even to let them enter the country freely, if they stopped their attacks in France.
The investigation was reopened a decade ago after anti-terrorist judge Marc Trevidic took office, vowing to bring to justice terror suspects from several cases.
Norwegian press reports say former members of Abu Nidal testified against four people they allege carried out the attack, including Abu Zayed. Another gunman lived in the West Bank and two others in Jordan.
In 2015, Marc Trevidic sent extradition requests but Jordan and the Palestinian Authority turned them down. Norway first refused to extradite Abu Zayed, because it had no extradition agreement with France. But after it signed an extradition deal with the EU last year it re-examined the case and transferred the suspect to Paris last Friday.
Although Abu Zayed claims he is innocent, Le Monde reported last week that he had admitted belonging to Fatah in the 1980s and being trained to use weapons. The paper also says Abu Zayed was sentenced t h r e e t i me s t o prison for violence against people in his entourage and various offences.
The case comes as French justice struggles with another antisemitic terror case — the bombing outside the Copernic Street synagogue that killed four people in 1980. The only identified suspect, Lebanese-Canadian National Hassan Diab, was released before trial after judges said evidence against him was not conclusive. Several testimonies and pieces of evidence pointed at him but witnesses testified he was in Lebanon at the time of the attack. His passport showed he had traveled to Europe says before the bombing but Diab said the document had been stolen.
French J ews faced a ser ies of attacks in the 1980s attributed to Palestinian groups, far right and far left terror organisations.
French Jews faced a series of attacks attributed to Palestinians’