Forty-three years after the bombing of a synagogue on Rue Copernicus in Paris, which killed four people and injured dozens, the only defendant, Canadian Hassan Diab, was sentenced in absentia to life imprisonment.

The hearings lasted three weeks. After eight hours of deliberations, a special criminal court in Paris handed down the maximum possible sentence to a 69-year-old university student and ordered that a warrant be issued for his arrest.

“We will carefully consider the next steps of the French government, what the French courts decide to do. But we will always be here to protect Canadians and their rights,” Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said at a press conference.

On October 3, 1980, at around 6:35 pm, a motorcycle bomb exploded near a synagogue, near the Champs Elysées, the first time since World War II that France’s Jewish community had been targeted.

During the trial, the prosecution stressed that life imprisonment was the only sentence that could be given to Hassan Diab, who was “undoubtedly” a criminal. No one has yet claimed responsibility for this attack.

Defense lawyers demanded that their client be acquitted, urging the five judges to “not make a miscarriage of justice.”

The case was based on information from French authorities who attributed the attack to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine – Special Operations (PFLP-SO), a splinter faction of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. The attack remained unsolved for many years, but in 1999 new information emerged that a group to which Hassan Diab belonged had made a bomb and left it in front of the synagogue.

The court saw only photographs of the defendant at various ages and compared them to a sketch of the man who bought the motorcycle used in the attack.

Diab claimed that he was innocent and that he was not in Paris at the time, where he was taking his exams at the University of Beirut. But the court found that his alibi undermined a passport seized in Rome in 1981 in his name. The passport also bears entry and exit stamps from Spain, the country from which the attack team is said to have left, on dates coinciding with the attack.

In 2018, the French authorities decided not to prosecute him. Diab was released and returned to Canada, but three years later the Court of Appeal overturned the previous decision and ordered him to stand trial for murder, attempted murder and criminal mischief.

“The first legal phase has been completed, it remains to be seen if Canada will extradite Mr. Diab,” said David Perr, a lawyer representing the civil suit.

Source: APE-MPE, AFP.