Ex-French spy chief admits 1980s pact with Fatah terrorists

Families of victims of 1982 Paris attack demand parliamentary inquiry over claims

Kim Willsher
Fri 9 Aug 2019 15.02 BST Last modified on Fri 9 Aug 2019 16.15 BST

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.

They have called on President Emmanuel Macron to declassify the top-secret file of the attack, which killed six and injured 22 others.

At lunchtime on 9 August 1982 a masked and armed commando entered Jo Goldenberg’s restaurant in the rue des Rosiers, in Paris’s Jewish quarter. The terrorists threw a grenade into the room then began shooting at diners and staff with machine guns. They threw a second grenade as they left. The attack lasted three minutes and the terrorists vanished into the district’s labyrinth of streets.

Investigators linked the attack to Fatah: the Revolutionary Council, established by Sabri Khalil al-Banna, known as Abu Nidal, whose dissident Palestinian group had split from Yasser Arafat’s Palestinian Liberation Organisation. The Abu Nidal Organisation, as it was also known, was considered one of the most ruthless of the Palestinian militant groups. It was thought to be responsible for attacks in 20 countries which killed more than 300 people, including in Rome and Vienna airports in 1985.

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 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.

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