Paris, Apr 22 (IANS): A court in Paris, almost 43 years after the deadly bombing of a Paris synagogue, has convicted a Lebanese-Canadian university professor of carrying out the attack in which four people were killed and 38 others wounded.
The judges ruled that Hassan Diab, 69, was the man who planted the motorcycle bomb in the Rue Copernic on 3 October 1980. They gave him a life sentence.
Diab refused to attend the trial and called his situation "Kafkaesque".
Prosecutors had argued it was "beyond possible doubt" that he was behind the bombing. His supporters have condemned the trial as "manifestly unfair", the BBC reported.
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, the British news broadcaster said in a report.
Diab is a Lebanese of Palestinian origin who obtained Canadian nationality in 1993 and teaches sociology in Ottawa.
He was first named as a suspect on the basis of new evidence in 1999. Eight years later, the French issued an international arrest warrant, and it was not until 2014 that Canada agreed to extradite. But in 2018 French magistrates declared the case closed for lack of proof, allowing Diab to return to Canada.
In 2021, an appeal against the closure of the case was upheld in the Supreme Court and a trial began earlier this month.
From the start Diab, protested his innocence and he did not return to France for the trial, which was conducted in his absence. His conviction means that a second extradition request will have to follow, though with strong doubts over whether it will succeed.
According to the Canadian Press news agency, Diab said on Friday that "we hoped reason would prevail".
Claiming that 15 years of legal "nightmare... is now fully exposed in its overwhelming cruelty and injustice", the Hassan Diab Support Committee in Canada has called on Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to make it "absolutely clear" that no second extradition would be accepted.