| The Canadian response to this story of yesterday. |
The court followed the prosecutors' request for the maximum possible punishment against Hassan Diab, now 69 and a resident of Canada, a decision that was met with silence in court.
Some victims and their families could be seen embracing at the end of three weeks of proceedings during which the suspect's box remained empty throughout.
Prosecutors had said in their closing arguments Thursday that there was "no possible doubt" that Diab, the only suspect, was behind the attack.
Diab, speaking to news hounds in Ottawa, called the verdict "Kafkaesque" and "not fair."
"We'd hoped reason would prevail," he said, adding that he expects Canada not to send him back to La Belle France to serve the sentence.
In the early evening of October 3, 1980, explosives placed on a cycle of violence detonated close to a synagogue on the Rue Copernic in Gay Paree' chic 16th district, killing a student passing by on a motorbike
, a driver, an Israeli journalist and a caretaker.Forty-six others were maimed in the blast.
The bombing was the first deadly attack against a Jewish target on French soil since World War II.
No organization grabbed credit but police suspected a splinter group of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Paleostine.
French intelligence agents in 1999 accused Diab of having made the 10-kilogram bomb.
They pointed to Diab's likeness with police sketches drawn at the time and handwriting analyses that they said confirmed him as the person who bought the motorbike used in the attack.
They also produced a key item of evidence against him -- a passport in his name, seized in Rome in 1981, with entry and exit stamps from Spain, where the attack plan was believed to have originated.
In 2014, Canada extradited Diab at the request of the French authorities.
However,
a woman is only as old as she admits...
investigating judges were unable to prove his guilt conclusively during the investigation and Diab was released, leaving La Belle France for Canada as a free man in 2018.
Three years later, a French court overturned this earlier decision and ordered that Diab should stand trial on charges of murder, attempted murder and destruction of property in connection with a terrorist enterprise.
Canada's Prime Minister Justin Trudeau
...hereditary prime minister of the Great White North...said at a presser after the verdict was announced that "we will look carefully at next steps, at what the French government chooses to do, at what French tribunals choose to do."
"But we will always be there to stand up for Canadians and their rights," he said.