More than 43 years after gunmen killed six people at a Jewish restaurant in Paris in what was then the deadliest antisemitic attack in France since World War II, the Palestinian Authority has extradited the man suspected of leading the assault, Arabic-language media reported Thursday.

Mahmoud Khader Abed Adra, known as “Hicham Harb,” is believed to have commanded the attackers who stormed the Jo Goldenberg restaurant in Paris’s historically Jewish Marais district on Aug. 9, 1982. Now 70, he has been the subject of an international arrest warrant for a decade.

The extradition came in unusual fashion. A hearing on France’s extradition request had been scheduled for Thursday at a Palestinian court in Ramallah, according to the Qatari newspaper Al-Araby Al-Jadeed. Instead, Harb’s family received a call from the Ramallah police chief informing them that he was already en route to Jordan, from which he would be transferred to French custody, the report said. The Palestinian Authority had never officially confirmed reports last September that its security forces had arrested Harb, although those reports preceded Thursday’s extradition.

The 1982 attack began around midday when a grenade was thrown into the dining room of the restaurant, which had roughly 50 customers inside. The attackers then entered and opened fire with Polish-made Wz-63 machine guns, continuing to shoot at passers-by as they fled. Six people were killed and 22 wounded.

France issued international arrest warrants for Harb and five other suspects in 2015, nearly 33 years after the attack. A French judge ordered a trial for all six in July.

Harb is the third defendant to reach French custody. Walid Abdulrahman Abu Zayed, 66, was extradited from Norway in 2020 after emigrating there with his family. Hazza Taha was detained last year in Paris.

Three suspects remain at large. Nabil Hassan Mahmoud Othmane, also known as Ibrahim Hamza, and Nizar Tawfiq Moussa Hamada, also known as Hani, are believed to be in either the Palestinian territories or Jordan. Mohamed Souhair al-Abassi, also known as Amjad Atta, is in Jordan, which has refused to extradite him.

The six suspects are believed to have been members of Abu Nidal, the terror organization named for its founder Sabri al-Banna. The group has been blamed for nearly two dozen attacks that killed at least 275 people, including the 1985 assaults on El Al Israel Airlines ticket counters at the Rome and Vienna airports, which killed 18.

Abu Nidal himself was found dead in his Baghdad apartment in August 2002. Iraqi authorities ruled the death a suicide.

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