PA said to extradite to France key suspect in 1982 Paris antisemitic terror attack

The Palestinian Authority has extradited to France a key suspect in a deadly 1982 terror attack on a Jewish restaurant in Paris, Arabic news reports said Thursday.

The terror shooting, in which six people were killed and 22 injured, was at the time the deadliest antisemitic atrocity in France since World War II.

Mahmoud Khader Abed Adra, known as “Hicham Harb,” is suspected of leading the attackers in the gun assault on the Jo Goldenberg restaurant in Paris’s Marais district, a historically Jewish quarter. He has been the subject of an international arrest warrant for 10 years.

Last September, reports said Harb, now 70, had been arrested by PA security forces, though this was never officially confirmed by the authority.

According to the Qatari newspaper Al-Araby Al-Jadeed, a hearing had been scheduled for Thursday at a Palestinian court in Ramallah regarding France’s extradition request.

However, Harb’s family instead received a call from the Ramallah police chief informing them that he was en route to Jordan, from where he would be extradited to France, the report said.

The attack began around midday when a grenade was tossed into the dining room of the Parisian eatery.

The attackers then entered the restaurant, which had around 50 customers inside, and opened fire with Wz-63 Polish-made machine guns. They also shot at passers-by as they escaped.

French authorities announced in 2015 — nearly 33 years after the attack — that international arrest warrants had been issued for Harb and five other suspects. In July, a French judge ordered a trial for them.

One of the defendants, Hazza Taha, was detained last year in Paris. Another defendant, Walid Abdulrahman Abu Zayed, 66, had emigrated with his family to Norway and was extradited to France in 2020.

The six suspects in the terror attack are thought to have been members of Abu Nidal, a terror group named for its late leader, whose real name was Sabri al-Banna.

Three other suspects in the 1982 attack are still thought to be at large.

Two of them are believed to be in either the Palestinian territories or Jordan: Nabil Hassan Mahmoud Othmane, also known as Ibrahim Hamza, and Nizar Tawfiq Moussa Hamada, also known as Hani. Another suspect, Mohamed Souhair al-Abassi, also known as Amjad Atta, is in Jordan, where authorities have refused to extradite him.

The group has been blamed for nearly two dozen attacks that left at least 275 people dead, including assaults on El Al Israel Airlines ticket counters at the Rome and Vienna airports in 1985, in which 18 people were killed.

Abu Nidal himself was found dead in his Baghdad apartment in August 2002. Iraqi authorities said he died by suicide.