Trial over fatal Paris synagogue attack opens after 43 years

(AFP) 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 Israeli journalist and a caretaker.

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