France's Special Criminal Court sentenced Lebanese-Canadian Hassan Diab , the sole suspect in the attack on a synagogue on Copernic Avenue in Paris on October 3, 1980, to life imprisonment after being tried in absentia.

The prosecution had requested this maximum punishment, which is the only "reasonable" punishment against this 69-year-old academic, saying there was "no doubt" that he was the perpetrator of this anti-Semitic attack that claimed the lives of four people nearly 43 years ago.

This attack, which targeted the Jewish community in France for the first time since the end of World War II, was attributed by investigators, based on intelligence, to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-Special Operations, a splinter group from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

After a long pause in the investigation, intelligence information revealed in 1999, that is, 18 years after the facts, the names of the supposed members of the group that carried out the attack, including Diab as the one who made the explosive device and loaded the motorcycle with ten kilograms of explosives that exploded in front of the synagogue.

The court only has black and white photos of this accused at different ages in his life and compares them with photos of the man who bought the motorcycle used in the attack, photos drawn based on witness statements in the 1980s.