Back in March 2015 the BBC News website published a report relating to the issue of arrest warrants for three men suspected of having been among those responsible for the 1982 terror attack on the Jo Goldenberg restaurant in Paris in which six people were killed and 22 wounded.
BBC News recycles three year old factual failures in Abu Nidal report
Three months later the BBC reported that one of the suspects had been arrested in Jordan. We have however not been able to find any follow-up BBC reporting on Jordan’s refusal to extradite that suspect and another one.
“The suspects in the Chez Jo Goldenberg attack were not formally identified until 2014, when two anonymous informants associated with Abu Nidal’s group supplied the French authorities with the missing information.
The following year, France’s top magistrate tasked with combating terrorism, Marc Trévidic, issued arrest warrants for several suspects, including Hamada and fellow Jordanian citizen Souhair Mouhamed Hassan Khalid al-Abassi — aka Amjad Atta — reputedly the mastermind behind the attack.
A French request to the Jordanian courts for al-Abassi’s extradition was similarly rejected in Oct. 2015 — just three months after the Hashemite Kingdom signed an extradition treaty with the French government.”
Neither have we been able to find any BBC coverage of a story which emerged around the 37th anniversary of that terror attack, for which no-one has stood trial. Several French, British and Israeli media outlets – including the BBC’s preferred paper, the Guardian – have reported that:
“Families of the victims of a 1982 terrorist attack in Paris are demanding a parliamentary inquiry after reports that the former chief of French intelligence made a secret pact with the perpetrators. […]
On Friday, Le Parisien newspaper reported that the former head of France’s intelligence service Yves Bonnet had admitted negotiating a “secret deal” with the [Abu Nidal Organisation] terrorist group. Now 83, Bonnet is said to have told investigators that he agreed the group’s members could continue travelling to France if they carried out no more attacks on French soil.
“We made a kind of verbal deal in which I said I don’t want any more attacks on French soil and in return I’ll let you come to France and I guarantee nothing will happen to you,” Bonnet reportedly said in an interview with investigating magistrates in January. […]
To date no reporting on that story appears on the BBC News website’s ‘France’ page.
