Last November, Carleton University became the target of international ire after Israel’s public universities called on the Canadian higher-education institution to fire Hassan Diab, a part-time sociology professor instructor who teaches social justice—and was convicted of bombing a synagogue in Paris in 1980. Jewish organizations and Israeli diplomats slammed his employment there as unconscionable; a French court had found him guilty in 2023, in absentia. This semester, Diab was not teaching at Carleton.
But is he actually guilty?
Diab himself has long claimed his innocence—and now his case has become the subject of a new deeply reported true-crime podcast, The Copernic Affair, published by the Canadaland media network. The six-part audio series raises serious questions about how French officials prosecuted the case, citing their use of incomplete or inadmissible evidence, reliance on a weak Canadian extradition system, and the political urge to bring someone—anyone—to justice for a traumatic antisemitic terrorist attack that’s entrenched into national memory.
On today’s episode of The CJN Daily, host Ellin Bessner is joined by the two journalists behind the first-ever investigation into Diab’s case: Alex Atak is a senior audio producer who often works for The Guardian, and Dana Ballout is an Emmy-award winning documentary producer with bylines on This American Life, National Geographic, the Wall Street Journal and Al Jazeera.
Transcript
Transcripts are AI-generated and may contain errors.
Ellin Bessner: And they both join me now. Dana, where and what are you zooming in from?
Dana Ballout: I’m calling in or zooming in from LA?
Ellin Bessner: And Alex?
Alex Atak: I’m in Brighton. Yeah, I’m in Brighton on the south coast of the UK.
Ellin Bessner: Yes, beautiful. Well, it’s great to have both of you together. Our audience may not all follow Canadaland or your amazing true crime podcast about a story which touches the world for the last 40 years. How did you get involved in wanting to tell this story?
Alex Atak: The first time I think both of us heard of the story and heard of Hassan Diab was after the 2023 trial in France in which he was found guilty in absentia. I sent a link to Dana and I said, you know, I think what we both found interesting about the story was that it seemed as though there were two very distinct narratives. There was the kind of narrative that we saw for the most part coming out of Canada, which seemed to be that, you know, Hassan Diab, his support group, kind of dominate the narrative, at least as far as we could tell. And, you know, the narrative in Canada, from what we could tell, was that he is a man wrongly accused and wrongly convicted. Then there’s the French side of it, which is, you know, I think you’d be hard-pressed to find almost anybody in the sort of mainstream in France that believes he is not guilty. So, we thought that’s, you know, it’s an interesting starting point for a podcast. Dana is Lebanese. I used to live in Lebanon. We felt Hassan Diab is also Lebanese. We thought we’d send him an email to see if he’d be interested in talking to us. And he was.
Ellin Bessner: I know your first episode dropped just a while ago. So how many years and months did you work to get it together before?
Dana Ballout: Over a year and a half.
Ellin Bessner: A year and a half.
Alex Atak: I mean, it took a while for us to kind of, you know, background interview. Like, it’s not even interviews, just kind of chats with Hassan Diab and some people around him just to sort of. Before they were sort of willing to go on the record and talk to us properly. So, it took a few months of that. And then I think we started. We started properly sort of July 2023.
Ellin Bessner: And he said yes to you, whereas he hasn’t really talked to many other people. How did you pitch this to him that he decided that you would be the venue for him to tell his story?
Dana Ballout: Actually, Hassan has spoken to a lot of press, so it wasn’t rare for him to speak to media at all. He’s done a lot of press interviews, especially in the Canadian media landscape. At the time that we had reached out to him, though Hassan had other offers for other podcasts. We were not the only one. So his story was kind of going around. Know, I don’t want to speak for him, but I think part of the draw was our backgrounds and our work. We’ve done a lot of storytelling around Arabs and Arabs in Diaspora over the past 10 years. Alex and I, you know, I grew up in Lebanon, I lived there. Alex also lived there for a period of time. So I think maybe understanding that we might kind of get some of the nuances around the story and having reported on similar stories in the past was probably a good selling point, I guess.
Alex Atak: Yeah, I mean, I guess like something that Canadaland and our editor Jesse Brown and I know, Julie, I mean, in all our conversations with Hassan Diab, even before we sort of recorded anything properly with him, was this is not a kind of work of advocacy or this, you know, we will be doing our best to speak to absolutely everybody we can for the story. We intend on telling the French side of the story. We didn’t have a kind of foregone conclusion when we came into it. We didn’t really know where anything would take us. And like, if our reporting took us in the direction that we ended up feeling that Hassan Diab was guilty and that, you know, we would present that in the. Without going into opinion, like, we would present everything in the podcast. It was never sort of intended nor did we pitch it to him as like, this is a venue for you to sort of tell your story. Like unquestioningly, you said, he said yes.
Ellin Bessner: And you got some amazing sources who said no that you wished you would have got to speak to you Many people.
Alex Atak: Yeah, a lot of people. I mean, I really wish we could have spoken to the judges in France who made the decision. They voted. I think there were five judges who voted on his guilt or innocence in the 2023 trial. I really, really wish we could have spoken to them because, I mean, the vote took place in secret. There’s no real way of knowing what happened in that room. You know, we don’t know if it was a 5-nil vote or if it was a 3 to 2 vote. Do you know what I mean? Like, I really wish we could have spoken to them just to kind of, you know, get inside their heads as they were deliberating on his guilt or his innocence in the 2023 trial. There were lots of people that we couldn’t talk to.
Dana Ballout: Yeah, a few people come to mind. One is the reporter that first told Hassan that he was a suspect in the case. His name is John Chichizola. He worked at Figaro. He turned us down many times. I wish we could have spoken to Corinne Adler. She was 13 at the time when the bombing took place, and it really left a big impact. She’s been at the forefront and the face of this case in many ways in France. In France, yeah. Rabbi Michael Williams, who was also there that day, that’s another person I wish we could have spoken to. Then one of the lawyers, one of Hassan’s French lawyers, Apolline Cagnatz, and I, I wish she would have said yes to us as well, because she was a big part of Hassan’s story in France.
Alex Atak: There’s also Yusuf Al Khalil, who was, you know, somebody who was, according to the French evidence, he was Hassan Diab’s friend at university. Somebody who attested to him being part of PFLP, which is the group who were suspected of carrying out the attack. At the time, he was the finance minister in Lebanon and, you know, quite a high-profile name, maybe that’s why he didn’t want to talk to us. For whatever reason, he turned us down too.
Dana Ballout: Yeah, but that’s the nature of these kinds of stories, you know. But the one thing that I will say that I’m quite proud of in this podcast is that we really reached out to absolutely everyone that we could find, like scouring over court documents, every name that was still alive. I tried to find Alex and I tried to find on Facebook, on LinkedIn, on Instagram, like, we really turned every stone that we could. So. But that’s the nature of these kinds of stories. A bunch of people are going to say yes, and a bunch of people will say no.
Ellin Bessner: So far, I know there’s only been five episodes. I actually don’t know how many there are or how many more are there.
Dana Ballout: Six. Just one.
Ellin Bessner: One more. One more. And what has been the reaction from the public? Because whereas the sort of support group who’s been around for 16 years, for him, that’s one thing. But public opinion in Canada, especially since November, when the Israeli ambassador published an op-ed in the National Post about how his friend’s mother was one of the fourth victims, really reignited a whole firestorm of publicity. Right. And you’re aware of this and you’re. You were still editing while this was happening. Right. And then Carleton University dropped him.
Alex Atak: Yeah, we can get into that later.
Ellin Bessner: But get into it now while we’re talking and then we’ll quickly.
Dana Ballout: Just a quick fact check. Carleton University did not drop him. His contract had just naturally ended in December. So it was widely reported that they terminated his contract, or that they fired him. But actually, when we fact-checked with them, that was not the case. His contract had ended again.
Ellin Bessner: So this is all happening while there’s this outcry from supporters in Canada. You’re editing. So now that people are listening to what you reported, have you heard anything change or, you know, feedback?
Alex Atak: I mean, episode six isn’t out yet. And so I think that episode six, as you said, is the one that takes in all of the kind of current events as it is. And I think we had a sort of version of the episode almost ready, and then things started happening, and we had to sort of change a lot of things. That’s how it goes sometimes. You know, I’m not Canadian, so I can’t say this for sure, but I sort of think that this is one of those stories that people may have been aware of maybe in the background or something they heard about years ago. And it’s not kind of a new story, I think, for most Canadians who follow the news. And so I think, like, we’ve had probably more of a reaction from, like, US listeners or Europe or UK listeners there that may be people who just haven’t heard this story before and it’s all new. I’m not just saying this; I do think all of the reactions so far have been positive. I don’t know if we’ve had any. It’s been like, oh, I didn’t know about this before, or like, oh, I sort of loosely knew about this. And this is the first time I’m sort of hearing the whole story put together this way.
Dana Ballout: But so far our reaction has been good. One of my favourite pieces of feedback was from a friend of mine who is Canadian Jewish, and he had heard about the Hassan Diab case because of the Elon Musk retweets and hadn’t known anything beyond what he had read in those tweets and was really outraged. But after listening to the podcast, he understood the story a lot better and we sort of shifted the way he thought about the story. And that, for me, was really all worth it in the end. Because if you can make someone think a little bit more deeply or look beyond the headlines and the sensationalist tweets or Xs or whatever they’re called now, then I think we’ve done our job well.
Ellin Bessner: Well, we should bring up the Elon Musk tweet. I always call it a tweet. It’s always going to be a tweet. I don’t care what he calls it.
Dana Ballout: Yeah, okay.
Ellin Bessner: And I’ll just quote it because I brought it up here. He said a mass murderer is living free in Canada and teaching. Something like that. Right. And this has been our slant from the Jewish perspective and other perspectives here. After listening to your podcasts so far, I’m changing my mind, too.
Alex Atak: Oh, interesting. Did you have…
Ellin Bessner: I didn’t know all the stuff that you said, and so I’m surprised that I actually am taking another look. It isn’t black and white. It isn’t cut and dried. And that is great journalism. It doesn’t go with the narrative that we have been looking at on our side. So I did change my mind.
Alex Atak: I mean, if I’d have asked you, like, sort of before you started listening to the podcast, like, about Hassan Diab, what you knew of the situation, what would you have said?
Ellin Bessner: Same convicted. We did say. I did say the Israeli ambassador is upset, is a convicted terrorist. This is anti-Semitism. This is whatever. Yeah, justice denied, my friend’s mother. That’s all still true, of course, but there’s a lot more. And I want to talk to you about what your podcast has shown. What evidence is there against him that he is guilty? And what evidence are you saying that—and you don’t have to go through five episodes because we don’t have time—but the main four or five things that are at issue, that he is innocent.
Dana Ballout: That’s a big question, Helen. Okay, so let’s start with the intelligence. So in the case file, in the record of the case, there were intelligence reports that pointed to Hassan Diab being one of several that were responsible for the Copernic Synagogue bombing. They named Hassan Diab as the bomber. As you hear in the series, you don’t know the sources of intelligence. So intelligence is problematic because you don’t know where the information came from and you also don’t know the methods in which they were gathered, which is one of the, you know, the counterarguments that Hassan’s lawyers bring in is that sometimes intelligence, especially at the time some of the intelligence are from Stasi records, could have been obtained through torture or otherwise. And obviously, that can be problematic.
Ellin Bessner: That’s easy for our listeners who may not remember East German intelligence. Yeah.
Dana Ballout: Yes, thank you. And then also some of the intelligence reports contained a lot of inaccuracies. Dates were wrong, so they’re not like the most accurate reports.
Ellin Bessner: And in your podcast, you said Israeli. I understood intelligence.
Dana Ballout: One of them.
Ellin Bessner: Wrong the name, wrong things that. How does that bode well for the rest of what’s in there?
Dana Ballout: Exactly, exactly. And then the other big piece of evidence against Hassan is that his passport was found in the hands of a PFLP Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine External Operations Unit, which was responsible for some of the attacks in the West. So this particular guy, a year later, was caught in Italy in 1981 with a stash of several passports. Some of them were fake, some of them were real, but Hassan Diab’s passport was among them. Hassan says that he had lost the passport, and there was indeed, you know, a black market for passports in Lebanon at the time. You have to remember, it was a civil war. Hassan says he lost it nonetheless. His passport was in the hands of this known PFLP operative guy. I don’t know, there’s so much. And then one of his friends from university says that Hassan was involved with a group that was kind of linked to the PFLP at the time, while Hassan says he was not a member of any political group, especially not a militant one. That’s kind of like. I don’t know, there’s, you know, and then there’s the handwriting analysis. But I don’t know if we want to get into all of that. Alex, do you want to?
Alex Atak: I mean. So, yeah. In the days after the attack in 1980, the French police gathered a hotel card which they believe was filled out by the person who perpetrated the attack. And it had five words written on it: Alexander Panadriou, which is the fake name the attacker was using. Larnaca, Cyprus technician. Right. So he had this kind of fake identity, I guess, as a Cypriot national. So the French gathered this hotel card, five words of block printed writing, and years later, it was compared to Hassan Diab’s handwriting. The methodology was criticised by multiple other experts during the extradition hearings, but essentially that’s another piece of evidence against him, is this handwriting analysis. And then there’s these police sketches that again, the French police gathered in the days after the attack from people that they believed had crossed paths with the bomber. And there’s lots of accounts of that and they sort of vary in how well they remember what he looked like. But. Yeah, but there’s police sketches too.
Ellin Bessner: So bottom line, you guys uncovered inconsistencies, circumstantial evidence. Evidence that’s not rock solid.
Dana Ballout: Yeah. Because some of the counter evidence, as well, is that there were reports of Hassan at the time of the bombing, attending university exams and being in Beirut. Several people attested to him being in Beirut at the time. And that’s some of the counter evidence that Hassan presents.
Ellin Bessner: So now, what did you feel when you started compared to now? Is there enough information that you’ve uncovered that he should be considered innocent or a scapegoat, or at least there’s not enough to send him back to France?
Alex Atak: It’s difficult to say, right. Like, we’re not lawyers; we’re not the people who would obviously be in charge of making decisions like that. So, it’s difficult to say. I think from our reporting over the last year and a half, it would be fair to characterize this as, you know, the evidence against him is weak and circumstantial at best, right? And I think whether or not that is enough to extradite him for a second time is kind of another question, because he was extradited before on the same evidence, and it was pretty weak then, and it was called weak by the extradition judge at the time. So that’s kind of the strange thing about this case, really, is, like, if this were, and this is by no means a foregone conclusion yet, but if this were to go to a second extradition hearing, they would be raking over the same evidence they had in the previous extradition hearing a decade ago. You know, no new evidence has come to light in that time. The conclusion we come to in our reporting is basically that it’s questionable at best, and if he were to be extradited again, I think rightly, people would ask questions about the validity or the sort of justification for that extradition.
Dana Ballout: Yeah. In the end, it’s not really our job to say whether Hassan is guilty or innocent, but I think based on everything that we’ve read and all of our interviews, we agree with what the extradition judge in Canada said, which was that it was weak and circumstantial. And I think we do agree with that.
Ellin Bessner: If he didn’t do it, or it’s not clear that he did it, who did?
Dana Ballout: Such a good question.
Alex Atak: It’s a really good question.
Dana Ballout: There are several theories out there. One, it could be other members of this group, the PFLPOs. Some have theorized that it was indeed a neo-Nazi group in France, and perhaps, you know, at the time, they were the first to claim responsibility for it. And then later, the police dismissed that claim. But some people say that members of the French police were engaging in a cover-up because many of them were neo-Nazis at the time. Another theory is that it was a different Palestinian group called Abu Nidal. I wish we knew; we tried, we tried to figure it out, and I wish we could give an answer. I don’t know.
Ellin Bessner: What’s he like now? What’s Hassan Diab like now? He’s not working at Carleton. How is he managing all this? How is he earning a living? How is his wife? What dangers are they facing?
Alex Atak: I mean, I’ll sense from our conversations with Hassan Diab, especially in the last sort of few months since, as you said, his story has kind of rocketed up the news agenda. Again, I don’t think his mental health, his mental state, is in a good place. I think this is, I mean, obviously, this weighs on him very heavily, the knowledge that, essentially any day, he could be rearrested, another extradition hearing, another extradition process could kick back into gear. I think that weighs very heavily on him. You know, he also has had death threats in the last couple of months, some of which have threatened his children who are young. I mean, his children are all under the ages of 13. So, yeah, I mean, is he coping? It’s hard to tell sometimes. I think as you hear in the series, he has this quite sort of cynically jolly manner, if that’s how I could put it. He’s sort of black humour. But I definitely think that, like, that’s his kind of outward facing persona when he’s talking to journalists, as he was to us. But I don’t know, who knows?
Ellin Bessner: What do you know about, like, what is on the horizon? The case, what we haven’t heard about the extradition because Canadian government doesn’t talk. It says we can’t talk to you. Whether they’ve asked or not, no one’s confirming or denying that there’s been an ask.
Dana Ballout: You know, we asked, we asked Marc Trevor, who was the first judge that made the extradition request. He seems to think that there is an extradition request that France made, although he is not the one responsible for making those requests anymore. He said that it’s very likely that France has made an extradition request. Canada will not confirm nor deny. And that means that Hassan could be arrested at any moment, including right now. You know, with Justin Trudeau on the way out and maybe Pierre Polyevra on the way in, it becomes increasingly likely that there would be an extradition. But we really don’t know.
Ellin Bessner: Am I understanding what you’re just saying? That Conservative government was signalling it would look kind on extradition.
Dana Ballout: I think that’s the assumption, yeah. Pierre Polyevra has multiple times, including his tweet, kind of criticized the Trudeau government for not extraditing or at least having Hassan Diab live, quote freely in Canada. That is kind of the signal that he would look more favourably towards extradition. And, you know, even if Hassan is extradited to France, he needs to face another trial in France. It’s not like he goes and that’s it, end of story, he would need to face another trial.
Ellin Bessner: But we know what happened last time. He sat in jail for three and a quarter years without a trial and then it was thrown out and he got to come home after solitary confinement. So just being extradited doesn’t guarantee you’re going to have speedy justice.
Alex Atak: Yeah, right, right.
Ellin Bessner: What was the most surprising thing that you’ve come away with in your investigations?
Alex Atak: I mean, honestly, you know, there’s a lot that’s surprising about the story. I think, you know, I went to France and did all of the interviews in France in person. You know, one of them, we got the prosecutor who was part of the team that brought the trial back, brought the case back to trial in 20. And by that point, you know, we had spoken to Hassan Diab, we had sort of heard his side of the story and we’d been through all of the court documents, etc. And I think I went into that interview maybe expecting that the prosecutor would be able to present like a sort of much stronger and coherent case for why he was found guilty. And he didn’t. I mean, he, you know, we circled over the same evidence that we’ve told you about here and really I sort of almost was like willing him to just like, sort of explain why the French are so convinced that Hassan Diab is the person who did this. And yeah, I mean, that wasn’t the feeling I came away from the interview with. So that surprised me. I mean, just that you think, like, I must be missing something here and like kind of the things that have been reported already and like, that’s it, that’s all that’s there.
Ellin Bessner: So sounds that flimsy.
Alex Atak: I think in France, you know, it’s almost. If it’s not Hassan Diab, it’s the question you asked earlier on, like, who is it? You know, we have victims and their families who are still very much traumatised by what happened, of course. And, like, from the kind of French legal institutions or investigators, etc., there’s no alternative answer. Like, there’s no. If it isn’t Hassan Diab, there is no case against anybody else. And so that might be partly why the case against Hassan Diab is being pushed. I don’t know. I really don’t know.
Ellin Bessner: They have to do this for their own national healing, too, even if it’s flimsy. They need to finish this somehow.
Alex Atak: Yeah, certainly, that is the feeling from Hassan Diab’s French lawyers, from his Canadian lawyers.
Dana Ballout: I want to jump in and say, but also denied by the French, right?
Alex Atak: Yeah, of course.
Dana Ballout: So, you know, maybe Hassan and his lawyers believe that Hassan is a scapegoat. The French just want to close this chapter and have someone. But we did this to one of the French prosecutors who adamantly denied that. So I just want to make that clear.
Ellin Bessner: Right. So they’re not just going through the motions for public sake.
Dana Ballout: They might be, but they deny it. So it’s important to just say that they deny that.
Ellin Bessner: All right, so finally, what do you want our listeners to understand about this story? Our Jewish, Canadian, and international listeners, that they may not have thought of before your podcast started about Hassan Diab and us having a, quote, convicted synagogue bomber living freely and teaching in Canada?
Dana Ballout: I would just say to really think more deeply about it. That’s what I would want from people listening to the podcast. Yeah. And that justice sometimes isn’t black and white either. It’s a tough topic and a tough issue that is really nuanced. My biggest hope is that people look a little bit more deeply and beyond sensationalist headlines that are in our face constantly. Just take a moment and listen to the nuance and context and various sides to this really tragic story. Truly.
Ellin Bessner: How much of this is Islamophobia in Canada against him?
Dana Ballout: The answer is, I don’t really know because, you know, I’ll tell you, the support group would often tell me that if Hassan’s name was John Smith or something similar, this would go very differently. I totally see that. You know, and also, that’s not the only thing at play here. I don’t know. It’s a hard one for me to answer. And I’m also not Canadian, and I don’t feel equipped to answer that question.
Alex Atak: Yeah, I mean, I think Hassan Diab would argue that it is a factor. As Dana said, his support group would certainly argue that it’s a factor. This kind of story began in the context of the post-9/11 years, and it’s important to understand that context to understand why Hassan Diab was scapegoated, as they would put it.
Dana Ballout: The concept of being quicker to assume that an Arab is guilty of such an attack is real. I do think that, in general, people are much more quick to assume someone is guilty because they have an Arab name or come from an Arab country. And I think that plays into not only Hassan’s case but many other cases, especially across the US and Canada.
Ellin Bessner: The interesting thing is that the former CJC Canadian Jewish Congress CEO Bernie Farber and the former Executive Director, President Benji Shinewald, and others have come out and apologized for being so quick to condemn back in the day. Now they said we were wrong, and they’re on the supporter side of Hassan Diab, which gives a lot more credibility to the fact that even the Jewish establishment is now coming to terms with, maybe we were too quick, maybe we were too hasty, maybe it’s time to reassess. That’s important. That’s not Islamophobia, that’s actually solidarity. So that’s, you know, what I mean? I just found that quite surprising and also quite telling.
Alex Atak: Yeah, I think that the interview with Bernie was, for me, one of the most memorable interviews we did for the series. Yeah, we spoke to him for a good couple of hours, and just the way he kind of articulated his journey was striking to us.
Ellin Bessner: After the interview, if he says so, then what should I think, right? I want to thank you both for sharing your story with us and being on The CJN Daily. It was an honour to chat with you.
Alex Atak: Thank you so much for having us.
Dana Ballout: Thank you so much, Ellin. It was so nice to chat with you.
Show Notes
What we talked about:
- Read some of The CJN’s coverage of the Hassan Diab saga, and hear The CJN Daily interview discussing the Copernic bombing with Israel’s Ambassador to Canada, Iddo Moed.
- Listen to The Copernic Affair on Canadaland.
- Read the Canadian government’s own scathing report on Canada’s extradition of Diab to France in 2018.
Credits
- Host and writer: Ellin Bessner (@ebessner)
- Production team: Zachary Kauffman (producer), Michael Fraiman (executive producer)
- Music: Dov Beck-Levine
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