Trial over fatal Paris synagogue attack opens after 43 years

Trial over fatal Paris synagogue attack opens after 43 years

PARIS: The trial of a 69-year-old Lebanese-Canadian charged over a fatal 1980 bomb attack outside a Paris synagogue opened on Monday after more than four decades of legal wrangling. Canada-based Hassan Diab, who denies any involvement in the attack which killed four and wounded dozens, told the court during preliminary hearings that he would not show up for the trial, after accusations against him had been dropped in an earlier investigation. In the early evening of October 3, 1980, explosives placed on a motorcycle detonated close to a synagogue in Rue Copernic in Paris’s chic 16th district, killing four people—a student passing by on a motorbike, a driver, an Zionist journalist and a caretaker.

Forty-six people were injured in the blast. The bombing was the first deadly attack against a Jewish target on French soil since World War II. No organisation ever claimed responsibility but police suspected a splinter group of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. French intelligence in 1999 accused Diab, a sociology professor, of having made the 10-kilogramme (22-pound) bomb.

They pointed to Diab’s likeness with police sketches drawn at the time and handwriting analyses that they said confirmed him as a suspect. They also produced a