Day: April 22, 2023

More than 42 years after the deadly bombing of a Paris synagogue, a court in Paris has convicted a Lebanese-Canadian university professor of carrying out the attack.

The judges decided that Hassan Diab, 69, was the young man who planted the motorcycle bomb in the Rue Copernic on 3 October 1980.

Four people were killed and 38 others wounded in the bombing.

Diab called his situation “Kafkaesque”, Canadian media reported.

He refused to attend the trial but the judges gave him a life sentence.

Prosecutors had argued it was “beyond possible doubt” that he was behind the bombing. His supporters have condemned the trial as “manifestly unfair”.

The Rue Copernic attack was the first to target Jews in France since World War Two, and became a template for many other similar attacks linked to militants in the Middle East in the years that followed.

The decades-long investigation became a byword both for protracted judicial confusion, as well as for the dogged determination of a handful of magistrates not to let the case be forgotten.

Diab is a Lebanese of Palestinian origin who obtained Canadian nationality in 1993 and teaches sociology in Ottawa.

He was first named as a suspect on the basis of new evidence in 1999, already nearly 20 years after the killings.

Eight years later the French issued an international arrest warrant, and it was not until 2014 that Canada agreed to extradite. But in 2018 French magistrates declared the case closed for lack of proof, allowing Diab to return to Canada.

Finally in 2021 an appeal against the closure of the case was upheld in the Supreme Court, the first time this had ever happened in a French terrorism case.

It meant a trial could finally go ahead, and it began earlier this month.

From the start Diab, protested his innocence and he did not return to France for the trial, which was conducted in his absence. His conviction means that a second extradition request will have to follow, though with strong doubts over whether it will succeed.

According to the Canadian Press news agency, Diab said on Friday that “we hoped reason would prevail”.

Responding to the verdict, the Hassan Diab Support Committee in Canada called on Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to make it “absolutely clear” that no second extradition would be accepted.

They said 15 years of legal “nightmare… is now fully exposed in its overwhelming cruelty and injustice”.

At a news conference, Mr Trudeau said his government “will look carefully at next steps, at what the French government chooses to do, at what French tribunals choose to do”.

“But we will always be there to stand up for Canadians and their rights,” he added.

Over three weeks the court heard an account of the known facts of the case, plus arguments identifying Diab as the bomber and counter-evidence suggesting he was a victim of mistaken identity.

None of the original investigating team was alive to speak, and the surviving witnesses who saw the attacker in 1980 all admitted that after more than 40 years their memories were too hazy to be reliable.

The bomb was left in the saddle-bag of a Suzuki motorbike outside a synagogue in the wealthy 16th arrondissement of Paris. Had there not been a delay, the pavement would have been packed with people leaving the religious service inside.

In 1980 the investigation initially centred on neo-Nazis, and there were mass demonstrations by the political left. But a claim by an ultra-right group was found to be fake, and by the end of the year attention had switched to a Middle East connection.

The bomber was identified as having a fake Cypriot passport bearing the name Alexander Panadriyu.

He was believed to have entered France from another European country as part of a larger group, and to have bought the motorbike at a shop near the Arc de Triomphe.

He was thought to belong to a dissident Palestinian group called the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-Special Operations (PFLP-SO).

But the investigation hit a wall, and it was not till 1999 that Hassan Diab’s name emerged from new information, believed to emanate from the former Soviet bloc.

Italian authorities then revealed that in 1981 the passport of a Hassan Diab had been found at Rome airport in the possession of a senior figure from the PFLP-SO. The passport bore stamps showing the holder entering and leaving Spain around the dates of the Rue Copernic attack.

The core of the prosecution case rested on the passport.

Under questioning while in custody, Diab explained that he had lost the passport just a month before the attack. But in Lebanon a French judge found an official declaration for the lost passport – a declaration made in 1983 and with a date of loss in April 1981.

The defence argued that all of this was circumstantial, and that there was still no hard evidence that Diab was in France in October 1980. They produced testimony from friends in Beirut who said Diab had been sitting university exams at the time of the attack.

Handwriting analysts who said the hotel registration form signed by the attacker was consistent with Diab’s script were also dismissed as inconclusive.

“The only decision that is juridically possible – even if it’s on a human level a difficult one – is acquittal,” defence lawyer William Bourdon said in his summing-up Thursday. “I am here before you to prevent a judicial error.”

But prosecutor Benjamin Chambre, while regretting that all the other members of the terrorist group had escaped without charge, said: “With Hassan Diab, we have the bomb-maker and the bomb-planter. That’s already something.”

Source: BBC

Evgenia Kara-Murza has been surviving on autopilot ever since her husband, Vladimir, was convicted of treason for his public criticism of President Vladimir Putin and Russia’s war on Ukraine.

On Monday, the Russian opposition politician was sentenced to 25 years in a high security prison and his wife has no idea when she or the couple’s three children will ever see him again.

She’s been so outspoken herself, she can’t risk travelling to Russia in case she too ends up in jail.

“I’m afraid they might detain me to put pressure on Vladimir, and I can’t afford him losing my voice as well, or leaving our kids without both parents,” Evgenia explained over the phone from the US, where the family live for safety.

She says she’s “heartbroken” – she hasn’t even been allowed to speak to her husband since his arrest over a year ago – but for now she’s numbed herself against the enormity of the verdict to focus on rallying international support.

Vladimir Kara-Murza is also a British citizen, but whilst the US, Canada and Latvia moved quickly to sanction Russian officials they hold responsible for the activist’s plight, his own government has been left playing catch-up.

On Friday, the UK Foreign Office announced sanctions against one judge and two investigators involved in Kara-Murza’s trial, as well as two Federal Security Service (FSB) agents suspected of links to his sudden, critical illness in 2015 and 2017 caused by a toxin that has never been identified.

Evgenia welcomed that move, but it’s well short of the more than 30 names she put forward.

“It only saddens me that it took a year of unlawful detention, a horrific sentence of 25 years in a strict regime and a very concerning deterioration of my husband’s health for the British government to move to a somewhat stronger response,” she told me, shortly after the announcement.

Vladimir Kara-Murza has again been losing feeling in both his feet and his left hand – symptoms which first appeared after his poisoning. A prison doctor has diagnosed polyneuropathy, which affects the nerves.

“For years, he was able to keep those symptoms at bay with regular exercise, but now they’ve returned and seem to be spreading,” Evgenia says. “I believe the Russian authorities are using it as torture; slowly killing a person.”

Vladimir Kara-Murza was born in Moscow in 1981 and moved to the UK as a teenager when his mother married a Yorkshireman.

He went to public school in Harrow then read history at Cambridge. He has a taste for tweed jackets and smoking pipes, and in one of the letters he sent me from prison, he listed Yes, Minister! and Fawlty Towers among his favourite TV shows.

Kara-Murza is as eloquent in English as in Russian, and uses both to condemn how President Putin has systematically crushed the democratic values that the activist holds so dear.

But his political ambitions have always focused firmly on his homeland. In his application to study at Cambridge, which I was shown, a teenage Kara-Murza described his greatest aspiration as “leading the country in which I was born”.

He grew up during Russia’s short-lived but intense burst of democratic chaos as the Soviet Union fell apart.

At 13, he even set up his own children’s political party and tried to get it registered with the Justice Ministry in Moscow, which refused.

“Even for those democratic days, this was too much,” he joked in one letter to me from his cell, with a grinning emoji.

His first significant political memory is of the failed coup in 1991, when hardliners tried to topple Mikhail Gorbachev and reverse his liberalising reforms. Kara-Murza’s father joined the giant crowd that built barricades around the parliament then, and the activist describes those as “the best and freest days” in Russia’s modern history.

By the time he graduated and returned to Moscow in 2003, President Putin was tightening the political screws.

That autumn, aged 22, Kara-Murza ran for a seat in the Russian parliament and lost. Genuine opposition candidates were still allowed on the ballot in those days, but the city authorities would extinguish the lights on his campaign billboards, and when he appeared in a TV debate, his microphone was cut.

Two decades on, he still refuses to be silenced.

His trial for treason was held behind closed doors although no state secrets were involved. Even the official charge sheet makes it clear that he’s being punished for challenging the Kremlin: the case is based on public political speeches, made at home and abroad.

So when he gave his final address to the court from a cage of bulletproof glass, the only audience before him was made up of prosecutors, investigators and judges: all cogs in the system that had found the activist guilty the day it ordered his arrest a year earlier.

But the text of his speech was quickly leaked by his supporters who posted it online in a modern-day version of samizdat, the way works of dissident writers were copied and shared in Soviet times.

It was short, under four minutes, if you read it aloud. But Kara-Murza would have weighed every word, aware that it was the most important address of his political life.

It delivers his own, damning judgement of President Putin’s rule. He calls Russia’s president a “dictator” and “usurper” and condemns his “criminal war” on Ukraine. It’s exactly the kind of talk that got him arrested.

Kara-Murza also recalls his great friend and political inspiration, Boris Nemtsov. Once a prominent reformer, Nemtsov was shot and killed in 2015, just metres from the Kremlin. Kara-Murza himself first fell critically ill a few months later.

After meeting in England, the two became close allies and friends, later collaborating on a project that was a huge irritant to Russia’s most rich and powerful.

They lobbied hard in the US for legislation known as the Magnitsky Act, allowing for punitive sanctions against Russian human rights violators. The bill took aim at a corrupt elite enjoying private schools, bank accounts and extravagant property in the West whilst trampling on basic freedoms at home.

A series of European countries soon passed their own versions of the law and Evgenia Kara-Murza believes the treatment of her husband is payback.

“I think it’s for a combination of things, including how he continues being unequivocal in his opposition to the regime and its crimes,” she says. “But 35 or 36 countries have the Magnitsky legislation now, which shows that Vladimir is very effective in his work. It’s why they hate him so much.”

Sergei Podoprigorov, the chief judge who sentenced Kara-Murza to prison, was one of the earliest targets of the list.

But Kara-Murza’s “Last Word”, his speech to a small, wood-panelled court in Moscow, was more than a denunciation of tyranny and a terrible war. It also conveyed his own dream, of another Russia. A country he still believes can one day be truthful, democratic and free.

“That day will come as surely as spring comes after even the iciest of winters,” he insisted from the dock, addressing anyone who might hear, against all the odds.

It’s that vision that has carried Vladimir Kara-Murza this far. It’s now the faith he must cling to in the solitude of his prison cell.

Source: BBC

A wide-ranging advertising campaign appears to have been launched in Russia urging citizens to join the military.

It comes as the Russian armed forces have reportedly been suffering heavy losses and struggling to make progress in Ukraine more than a year after invading it.

The Defence Ministry in Moscow released a video appealing to Russians to give up their civilian jobs in favour of a contract with the military.

The video features a supermarket guard, a fitness instructor and a taxi driver – all apparently disillusioned with civilian life and finding fulfilment after joining the army.

The video promises a monthly salary of at least 204,000 roubles ($2,500; £2,000), four times Russia’s average.

Ukrainian propagandists were quick to subvert the ad, producing an edited version with the wording changed. The characters in the video are now against killing children and beheadings, and “don’t want to be held responsible for [President Vladimir] Putin’s war crimes”.

While the Russian version says “be a man”, the Ukrainian video responds “be a person” – in other words, don’t commit atrocities.

The Russian video is part of a wider campaign that has received generous airtime on state TV, and also appeared in the press.

On VKontakte, Russia’s most popular social network, the number of army ads has jumped sevenfold, according to research by independent website Novaya Gazeta.

The campaign in the media has run alongside army advertising in Russia’s streets.

“Impossible to understate just how ubiquitous this army recruitment drive is,” said one Twitter user in the Russian capital.

“It has completely taken over Moscow and you can barely go two minutes without seeing another poster.”

What the ads don’t say

The recruitment drive is likely to have been prompted by the Russian military’s desperate need for new soldiers after more than a year of fighting in Ukraine.

According to leaked US documents, the Pentagon estimates Russian losses at between 189,500 and 223,000 casualties, with 35,500-43,000 men killed in action.

In September 2022, President Vladimir Putin announced “partial mobilisation”, which sought to recruit new soldiers regardless of whether they wanted to join the army, and led to a dip in his popularity.

This time, the authorities in Moscow seem keen to avoid openly declaring mobilisation.

“There is no talk in the Kremlin about a new wave of mobilisation,” Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on 21 April.

He was responding to a question about reports that students in the Russian capital have started receiving call-up papers.

Other ways of boosting army numbers which have been used by the Russian government include allowing the Wagner private military company to recruit mercenaries in prisons.

Also in April 2023, the Russian parliament made it easier to recruit new army members and much more difficult to avoid the draft by approving legislation to start serving call-up papers online.

Under a decree issued by President Putin in September 2022, those who sign up will not be able to leave the army until the war – officially known as the “special military operation” in Russia – is over.

Source: BBC

More than 3,000 people have been evacuated from their homes in the Russian city of Belgorod after an undetonated explosive was found.

It comes two days after Russia accidentally dropped a bomb on the same city, damaging houses and injuring several people.

It’s not known if the bomb discovered on Saturday came from the same aircraft – a Russian Sukhoi-34 fighter-jet.

The city is located about 40km (25 miles) from the border with Ukraine.

The local governor, Vyacheslav Gladkov, confirmed on Telegram that 17 apartment buildings had to be cordoned off “within a radius of 200 metres”, affecting 3,000 residents.

He later said people were starting to return to their homes after a “shell” had been removed.

The undetonated device was found in the same area as the bomb that was accidentally dropped on Thursday evening, leaving a huge crater about 20 metres (60 ft) wide close to the city centre.

The explosion was so large it blew a car on to the roof of a nearby shop.

After that incident, the Russian defence ministry admitted that one of its Su-34 jets had “accidentally discharged aircraft ordnance” over the city.

Dramatic CCTV footage of Thursday’s blast shows an object landing near a crossroads with passing cars, and detonating about 18 seconds later.

It’s not the first such incident – last October a Sukhoi fighter-jet – again, an Su-34 – crashed in the Russian city of Yeysk killing at least 13 people.

Russian jets regularly fly over Belgorod, a city of 370,000, on their way to Ukraine.

It lies just north of Ukraine’s second city, Kharkiv, and has come under periodic Ukrainian attack since the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine last year.

Source: BBC

At least two people have died and another ten were injured after a waiter flambéed a dish, accidentally setting fire to an Italian restaurant on a busy Friday evening in Madrid.

One of the injured is in a critical condition and five others have serious injuries.

Plastic plants in the restaurant caught fire during the flambé process, and the flames rapidly spread.

Flambéeing is a technique that involves the use of a blowtorch to light food.

The food is usually covered in spirits and set alight for dramatic effect, sometimes giving it a smoky flavour.

The fire broke out near the entrance of the Burro Canaglia restaurant, which made it harder for people to escape, Spanish newspaper El Pais reported.

The paper also reported that one of those who died was an employee.

Though the blaze was extinguished quickly, it was “extremely intense” and generated “a lot of smoke,” the Mayor of Madrid, Jose Luis Martinez-Almeida said.

The mayor said there had been about 30 diners and staff members in the restaurant at the time of the fire.

He warned there would have been more victims had the firefighters taken longer to attend the scene, adding that it was extinguished within 10 minutes from the first warning of the blaze.

Police have launched an investigation into the causes of the fire.

Source: BBC

Day trippers from France will be able to enter Jersey with a national ID card rather than a passport from Saturday.

A pilot scheme has been set up for passengers on the Manche Iles Express ferry service during the summer.

Earlier this year the Government of Jersey announced the change in required travel documents.

It means French nationals traveling for the day on commercial passenger ferries can enter Jersey using their national ID cards instead of their passport.

Following Brexit, rules were brought in requiring visitors from outside the Common Travel Area to show passports on entry.

The first ferry of the season leave Normandy on Saturday morning and is scheduled to arrive in St Helier harbour at 09:20 BST.

Manche Iles Express operates a regular ferry service between Normandy and the Channel Islands from April to September.

It also offers a regular inter-island connection between Jersey, Sark and Guernsey.

Source: BBC