Orly Airport Attack - Investigation

Investigation

Shortly after the Orly blast, the French police arrested 51 suspected ASALA militants. According to the police, all the arrested came to France within one year and had been under surveillance by intelligence forces. The police confiscated weapons and explosives, including pistols and submachine guns. ASALA threatened with military attacks on the French interests around the world if "the French regime continues its method of terror and terrorism against the Armenian people". A few days after the French arrest of fifty-one Armenians in connection with the Orly bombing, ASALA bombed the Air France office and the French Embassy in Tehran, and threatened more attacks.

French police detained 29-year old Varoujan Garabedian (Varadjian Garbidjian), a Syrian national of Armenian extraction, who confessed to planting the bomb at the airport. Garabedian claimed he was the head of the French branch of ASALA. At the airport, Garabedian said he had too much luggage and gave a passenger $65 to check the bag for him. The bomb was intended to explode aboard a Turkish Airways plane en route from Paris to Istanbul, but it detonated prematurely on a baggage ramp.

Garabedian confessed that the bomb was assembled at the home of an Armenian of Turkish nationality, Ohannes Semerci, in Villiers-le-Bel. In Marseilles, police later arrested another Turkish citizen of Armenian extraction, 22 years old Nayir Soner, an electronics specialist who was suspected of assembling the bomb.

French press alleged that the French Socialist government had struck a secret deal with ASALA in January 1982, in which there would be no further attacks on French soil in return for French recognition that the Turks had attempted genocide against the Armenians in 1915. Under the terms of the deal ASALA members supposedly were also granted unrestricted use of French airports, and four ASALA members charged with the takeover of the Turkish consulate in Paris, in which a security guard was killed, were given light sentences (seven years in jail). Garabedian told French investigators that the violation of the secret pact by ASALA was an accident, and that the suitcase bomb was supposed to detonate on board the Turkish airliner, not on French soil. But the Orly airport attack forced the French government to crack down on ASALA.