An Ottawa judge has decided to allow handwriting evidence likened by a prosecutor to the "smoking gun" in the case against accused terrorist bomber and Ottawa university professor Hassan Diab.
The French say Diab was a key player in a terrorist bombing outside a Paris synagogue in 1980 and want the Lebanon-born Canadian citizen to stand trial in Paris for murder and attempted murder.
Based on witness statements taken shortly after the bombing, it is more or less accepted that the man who signed into a Paris hotel using the false name Alexander Panadriyu was the person who planted the bomb in a motorcycle saddlebag outside the synagogue.
Police compared that hotel card signature with Diab's writing on mid-1990s United States government documents and it is those comparisons that are the centre of the handwriting analysis argument.
Canada's extradition law tells judges to accept evidence provided by foreign governments more or less at face value unless it's manifestly unreliable — an extradition proceeding is not a full trial, the argument goes, and it's only at a full trial that evidence can be properly examined.
Diab's lawyer Don Bayne had sought to have the handwriting evidence excluded from his extradition proceeding on the grounds that the expert the French authorities relied upon had done an improper job comparing the old sample and the new one.
In his decision, Ontario Superior Court Justice Robert Maranger said he found the French handwriting evidence "problematic" and "confusing" with "suspect conclusions," but it would violate the Extradition Act if he imposed Canadian standards of evidence admissability to foreign evidence.
Maranger also said the three competing opinions by defence handwriting experts about the reliability of the French expert Anne Bisotti's conclusions were a matter for trial and not the extradition hearing.
"When all is said and done, I find that the evidence amounted to very strong competing inferences which demonstrate some serious weaknesses in the Bisotti report but in truth fell short of a finding of manifest unreliability," said Maranger.
"While I find the Bisotti report very problematic, very confusing, with conclusions that are suspect, I cannot say that it should be rejected out of hand based on the expert evidence," he added.
Even though he didn't grant Diab's request to exclude the evidence, Maranger said there was some merit to the "forceful and compelling" arguments by Diab's lawyer, Bayne, that "flawed methodology results in manifestly unreliable conclusions."
Arguments are expected to begin next week into the admissability of intelligence evidence linking Diab to the the terrorist group believed responsible for the bombing.