Origins of Evidence

France cannot be trusted to diligently vet evidence it receives from intelligence sources emanating from elsewhere. "When you allow foreign intelligence the grave danger you face is that you don't know where it came from. If it's from foreign sources as opposed to your own, you have no control over the circumstances in which the intelligence was produced."

This lesson in jurisprudence and admissible evidence from Donald Bayne, lawyer for Hassan Diab, whom France has requested be extradited to stand trial on charges of terrorism.

France believes Mr. Diab to have been one of the principals involved in the bombing of a synagogue in central Paris in 1980. That Mr. Diab manufactured an explosive, packed it into the saddlebags of a motorcycle, parked the motorcycle outside the Copernic synagogue, and timed it to go off just as the Jewish faithful were to have exited their place of worship.

Several things went wrong with the plan; the service was extended, and when the bomb detonated, only one Jew died; three other French citizens perished and many more were grievously wounded.

This was not a suicide bombing. Those who planned the atrocity had no intention of giving up their lives in exchange for extracting those of as many innocent people as possible, while in the ecstatic throes of hate-fuelled murder. The murderers escaped successfully, leaving Parisians to pick up the pieces - literally, of the dead and the wounded.

Although Mr. Diab has strenuously and repeatedly denied ever being a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a PLO offshoot, his friends at the time are reported to have informed investigators that they had all belonged to the PLO, a political movement that sought to restore all of what was once Palestine to Palestinian Arabs in rejection of the presence of the State of Israel.

Germany, the lawyer points out, was likely where most of the evidence now in the hands of the French prosecution, came from. And in all likelihood, it was derived from another source, say, Israel. "We don't know where Israel obtained its intelligence. Jordan, Syria, Egypt? Who knows? There is no reasonable assurance (that it didn't come from torture)."

There, the suggestion of torture used to extract questionable evidence. That should quash any proclivity to place trust in those dastardly French.

And what a circuitous route, to be sure: Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Israel - finally Germany. An unsavoury lot in total. One shudders to think that intelligence sources in some of those countries might be the undoing of an innocent man.

Haven't we been through this before?