Palestinian authorities extradite suspect in 1982 Paris restaurant bombing

A grenade exploding into a packed dining room and machine-gun fire in the doorway turned dinner service at Jo Goldenberg into a mass-casualty scene, leaving six people dead and 22 injured on Rue des Rosiers in Paris’s Marais district. Forty-four years later, French authorities took custody of the suspect they say helped coordinate the attack, reopening one of the country’s most painful restaurant killings.

The man extradited by the Palestinian authorities was identified as Hicham Harb, also known as Mahmoud Khader Abed Adra. French anti-terror prosecutors said the 72-year-old was handed over on April 16, 2026, after a request dated September 30, 2025, and detained on arrival at an air base near Paris. Prosecutors said Harb had been wanted under an international arrest warrant for 10 years and was suspected of having supervised the attack, and possibly taking part as one of the gunmen.

The assault on August 9, 1982, struck a Jewish restaurant in the Marais, a neighborhood with deep historical significance in Paris and a busy dining corridor where service workers were suddenly forced into chaos. French reporting says roughly 50 customers were inside when attackers threw a grenade into the restaurant and opened fire with Polish-made Wz-63 machine guns as they fled. The attack was blamed on the Abu Nidal Organization, and it remains one of France’s deadliest postwar antisemitic attacks.

The extradition follows a wider legal push in the case. French judges ordered a trial for six suspects in July 2025, and in February 2026 the French Court of Cassation confirmed that a trial would go ahead for two other Palestinians held in France. Another accused man, Abou Zayed, a Norwegian citizen of Palestinian origin, has been held in France since his extradition from Norway at the end of 2020 and has denied the charges.

French President Emmanuel Macron welcomed the handover and said France was working with the Palestinian Authority to secure a swift extradition, adding that justice would prevail. Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot said he had briefed victims’ families on the latest developments. David Pere, a lawyer for those families, said the more than four-decade delay had gone on too long and pressed for a speedy trial.

The case also reaches beyond Paris. Reporting has linked Harb to a 1988 German arrest warrant over the 1985 Frankfurt airport attack and to Italian suspicions over a 1982 assault on a synagogue in Rome, where a two-year-old was killed. For the restaurant community, the extradition brings back a simple, brutal fact: a dining room can become a crime scene in seconds, and accountability can take a generation.