Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Stay informed with free updatesSimply sign up to the Arts myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.On October 3 1980, there was an explosion on a quiet street in Paris. A bomb placed on a motorcycle had exploded by a synagogue on the Rue Copernic in the city’s 16th arrondissement. Four people died and 46 were hurt, many of them sustaining life-changing injuries. It was the first targeted attack on the Jewish community on French soil since the second world war. Yet in the months and years that followed, no group claimed responsibility, and no one was convicted for this act of terrorism. Fast-forward to 2023 and the Paris trial of Hassan Diab, a 69-year-old sociology professor from Lebanon living in Ottawa, Canada, who was accused of planting the bomb. The trial was taking place in Diab’s absence since Canadian authorities declined to extradite him (Diab denied responsibility, maintaining that he was in Beirut sitting university exams at the time of the explosion). In the preceding decade, Diab had been put under house arrest in Canada, and later held in jail in France for more than three years, only for a French court to dismiss the case against him due to a lack of evidence. He returned to Ottawa in 2018. Quite how this chaotic case has unfolded over 45 years is explained in The Copernic Affair, a new podcast from the Canadaland network. The series is presented by the LA-based podcaster and documentarian Dana Ballout and the UK journalist Alex Atack, both of whom specialise in stories from the Middle East. Their work here is diligent and detailed, presenting a story packed with so many twists you may want to take notes to keep up. After bingeing on all six episodes in a day, my immediate impulse was to go back and start again to see what I might have missed. Ballout and Atack’s coup lies in landing lengthy interviews with two figures at the heart of the case. The first is the French magistrate Marc Trévidic, who reopened the Copernic file in 2007 and alighted on Diab as one of the possible bombers. Here Trévidic emerges as charismatic, well-intentioned, determined to see victims of the bombing get justice. The second is Diab himself, whose answers to the hosts’ questions are often circuitous and rambling, but whose frustration at the flip-flopping of French judges is clear.This story isn’t purely about Diab’s guilt or innocence — the 2023 trial found him guilty in absentia; it considers, too, the bewilderingly slow-moving French justice system in which magistrates oversee criminal investigations and wield extraordinary power (credit to the podcast creators for extracting suspense from such a creaking system). It is also about a Jewish community left grieving and in limbo for decades. We may never know whether Diab really was the bomber, though this series deems the most recent case against him “circumstantial and weak”. The Copernic Affair is a fascinating tale masterfully told by its two hosts. And it may not be over yet.canadaland.com/shows/the-copernic-affair
