World
France to indict six suspects 40 years after terror attack on Jewish restaurant
Six people were killed and 22 injured in the attack in 1982
July 11, 2025 09:07
Six people were killed and 22 injured in the attack in 1982
July 11, 2025 09:07French prosecutors announced on Wednesday that they are seeking to bring six individuals to trial before a special terrorism court in connection with a 1982 attack on a Jewish restaurant in Paris, which killed six people and wounded 22 others.
One of the suspects, Walid Abdulrahman Abu Zayed, has been held in custody in France since late 2020. Arrest warrants for the remaining suspects have been issued, though it is not known whether they are in France, Reuters reported.
The attack on the Chez Jo Goldenberg restaurant – in heart of the Jewish district of the Marais quarter – was carried out with grenades and machine guns, and was the deadliest antisemitic assault in France since the Second World War.
Israel and other Western intelligence agencies said it was perpetrated by members of the Fatah-Revolutionary Council (Fatah-RC), a now-defunct radical Palestinian dissident terror group that was based in Iraq at the time.
In addition to Abu Zayed, who is suspected of being one of the gunmen involved in the attack, France’s National Anti-Terrorism Prosecutor’s Office also named Nizar Tawfik Mussa and Mahmoud Khader, who are wanted on charges of murder and attempted murder linked to a terrorist organisation.
Three other individuals are sought on charges of aiding and abetting murder and attempted murder within the same context.
The news comes just a month after French lawmakers unanimously backed a posthumous promotion for Captain Alfred Dreyfus.
The Jewish officer was wrongly convicted of treason in 1894, stripped of his rank and deported to the penal colony of Devil’s Island, off the coast of French Guiana.
He was pardoned in 1899 after four years in the penal colony, and his conviction was overturned in 1906.
At that point he returned to duty with a promotion to major, but had fallen behind his peers. He retired as a lieutenant colonel after serving in the First World War.
The Dreyfus Affair – as it came to be known – became symbolic of late 19th century French antisemitism, and inspired the contemporary polemic ‘J’Accuse’ by Émile Zola.
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