Federal Justice Minister Rob Nicholson has ordered the deportation of Ottawa university professor Hassan Diab to France, to face charges he was involved in the 1980 bombing of a synagogue in Paris that killed four people and injured dozens of others.
Diab, 57, originally from Lebanon, was arrested in a raid on his apartment by the RCMP's anti-terrorist squad in November of 2008. He spent several months in jail before being released on strict bail conditions.
Justice Robert Maranger, who originally ruled last summer that Diab should be set to France, said the low legal threshold of Canadian extradition law left him no choice. But he also said that the French government's case was likely too weak to convict Diab, had he been tried here in Canada.