It is the end of a long wait for the families of the victims.

Walid Abdulrahman Abou Zayed, one of the suspects in the rue des Rosiers attack in 1982 in Paris, which killed six people, arrived in France on Friday, December 4 after being extradited by Norway.

He must be presented to an examining magistrate on Saturday, we learned from an airport source.

This 62-year-old man arrived shortly before 8 pm at Roissy airport, in the Paris region, on an Air France flight from Oslo, where he had lived since 1991. Norway had authorized on November 27 his extradition and had ten days to execute this decision.

He was to be placed in an administrative detention center on his arrival on French soil, then presented on Saturday to an investigating judge from the anti-terrorism pole of the Paris judicial court, according to a source close to the file.

France had issued on February 20, 2015 an international arrest warrant against this Palestinian born in 1958 in the West Bank and naturalized Norwegian in 1997, suspected of having participated in the attack which left six dead and 22 wounded on August 9, 1982 in the historic Jewish quarter of the Marais, in the 4th arrondissement of Paris.

"I don't like France"

That day, a commando group of three to five men threw a grenade into the Jo Goldenberg restaurant in the "Pletzl" - the Jewish quarter of Paris -, then strafed the interior of the establishment as well as passers-by.

The operation was quickly attributed to the Fatah-Revolutionary Council (Fatah-CR) of Abu Nidal, a Palestinian dissident group of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO).

French justice suspects Abou Zayed, father of four, of having been "one of the shooters of the attack". 

"I don't like France. I don't want to go to jail in France," Abu Zayed, known as Osman in Norway, said in a Norwegian court appearance in September.

The man, who claims his innocence, assuring that he was in Monte-Carlo at the time of the attack, opposed an extradition to France.

His extradition, nearly four decades after the events, paves the way for a trial before a special assize court, long awaited by the victims. 

With AFP

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