A court in Paris has convicted a Lebanese-Canadian university professor, Hassan Diab for bombing a Paris synagogue, more than 42 years ago.
In the recent ruling, the judges decided that 69-year-old Diab was the young man who planted the motorcycle bomb in the Rue Copernic on October 3 1980.
It could be recalled that four people were killed and 38 others wounded in the bombing.
Even though Diab refused to attend the trial, the judges gave him a life sentence.
Prosecutors had argued it was “beyond possible doubt” that he was behind the bombing.
In swift reactions, Diab supporters have expectedly condemned the trial as “manifestly unfair”.
Records have it that the Rue Copernic attack was the first to target Jews in France since World War Two, and became a template for many other similar attacks linked to militants in the Middle East in the years that followed.
According to reports, the decades-long investigation became a byword both for protracted judicial confusion, as well as for the dogged determination of a handful of magistrates not to let the case be forgotten.
It is germane to note that Diab is a Lebanese of Palestinian origin who obtained Canadian nationality in 1993 and teaches sociology in Ottawa.
Local reports have it that he was first named as a suspect on the basis of new evidence in 1999, already nearly 20 years after the killings.
