A Carleton University professor offered her limited life savings yesterday as insurance that her common-law husband would return to court to face charges in the bombing of a Paris synagogue in 1980.
Rania Tfaily said her relationship with Hassan Naim Diab - a man 25 years her senior whom she met in 1997 when he was her university professor - has gone through some rocky patches since it turned romantic three years ago.
They were married in a Muslim religious ceremony, but are not legally wed, she told the judge who will decide on Dec. 3 whether the 55-year-old Lebanese-born Canadian should be freed on bail to await an extradition hearing.
At the time of his arrest last week, Prof. Diab was a part-time teacher at both Carleton and the University of Ottawa. But he had no job when he moved into Prof. Tfaily’s condo in 2006. She has always paid the bills, she told the court.
In the winter of 2007, Prof. Diab flew off to Cuba with another woman, but Prof. Tfaily said she thought it would have been “unfair” to ask the identity of his travel companion because their “relationship was not working” and she expected him to move out. He didn’t.
Then, in late March of this year “things started to get bizarre,” she told the court. People in cars with tinted windows were following Prof. Diab and photographing the two of them at Starbucks. She said a break-in at her condo convinced her that she should keep all of their identification, including their passports, at her Carleton office.
“I became very stressed. I couldn’t concentrate on my work, I couldn’t concentrate on anything,” Prof. Tfaily said. They decided he should get his own place and he rented a room in Gatineau, Que., across the river from Ottawa.
“Things started to get better,” she said. Then came his arrest in the notorious bombing that killed four French men and an Israeli woman and injured scores of others.
Prof. Diab and his lawyers say the French authorities have got the wrong man.
Prof. Tfaily agrees. “Of course, I believe he is innocent. I think this is a mistake,” she told the court.
She said she is willing to put up the several thousand dollars she has in her savings account plus her $15,000 line of credit as bail.
Court documents say that former acquaintances of Prof. Diab have said that he and his ex-wife - a woman who is still a family friend and has stayed with Prof. Diab and Prof. Tfaily - were members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Prof. Diab has denied being a member of the organization. The court file also says that he resembles a man depicted in police sketches of the bomber, that a handwriting analyst says his writing matches that of the bomber and that a passport suggests he was in Europe at the time.
But Adam Chami, who worked with Prof. Diab at a bank in Lebanon and now lives in Toronto, said the man he considers to be his brother could not be a mass killer. He too is willing to put up something over $8,000 in savings plus a $15,000 credit line to get Prof. Diab out of jail.
Defence lawyer Réné Duval said Prof. Diab poses no flight risk, pointing out that he made no plans to flee even though he knew he was being followed. He ripped apart the evidence used to arrest his client, calling it dubious.
But Crown prosecutor Claude LeFrançois said that if Prof. Diab does have ties to the PFLP, it would be easy for him to get the documents and support he needs to skip the country. And he argued that the evidence against Prof. Diab is substantial. “This has been a very, very long and difficult investigation over the past 28 years,” Mr. LeFrançois said, “and the French have finally caught up to Mr. Diab.”
