http://www.cbc.ca/beta/news/politics/hassan-diab-back-in-canada-1.4489738 Ottawa academic Hassan Diab has returned home after a nine-year ordeal, including three years in a maximum-security prison in France.
Diab's supporters in Canada have long argued that he should never have been extradited to a foreign country on the basis of evidence that would not have stood up in a Canadian court.
Judges in France ordered Diab's release on at least eight occasions before he was finally set free, but under the French system prosecutors were able to keep him behind bars by appealing those release orders on grounds that Diab was a flight risk and public danger.
He remained imprisoned despite the fact that he did not match a fingerprint left by the perpetrator of the Paris bombing in 1980, and could demonstrate that he was in fact sitting exams in Beirut at the time it occurred. Both university records, and the stamps in Diab's passport, backed his claims.
Bombing a synagogue is a heinous crime, as are attacks on any place of worship - or for that matter anywhere people congregate. Like recent attacks on mosques and churches by white supremacists, it is also a hate crime. But there is no valid evidence that Dr. Diab committed it.... I wonder if there was some kind of rush to judgement to find a culprit?
