(JTA) — France agreed not to target Palestinian terrorists who killed French Jews in Paris in 1982 if they refrained from carrying out further attacks on French soil, a former top spy revealed.
Yves Bonnet, who headed the now-defunct DST service in the 1980s, made the assertion in January to a judge investigating the 1982 attack in which six people were murdered and 22 injured at a kosher restaurant on Rosiers Street, Le Parisien reported Thursday.
The suspects in the attack on the Jo Goldberg deli are wanted for questioning per a 2015 French arrest warrant. One of the suspects lives in Jordan, another near Ramallah in the West Bank and a third in Norway, according to the CRIF umbrella group of French Jewish communities.
None of the relevant governments have agreed to extradite the suspects, whom French investigators believe belonged to the Abu Nidal terrorist group, which splintered in 1974 from Fatah.
“We entered a sort of verbal deal which tells them: I want no more attacks on French soil, but I will allow you to come to France and guarantee nothing will happen to you,” Bonnet said, according to Le Parisien.
French authorities allowed two of the alleged perpetrators to visit their brothers in arms in French prisons after the 1982 attack, in which the terrorists threw grenades into the packed restaurant. It was the bloodiest anti-Semitic attack in France since World War II.
“It worked, there were no further attacks from the end of 1983 throughout 1984 and until 1985,” Bonnet said.
