Man in court after father’s 29-year fight for justice

A RETIRED German doctor who was kidnapped and left in front of a French courthouse on the orders of a grieving father has gone on trial in Paris over the killing of a teenage girl 29 years ago.

The unusual trial is the culmination of a decades-long battle between two men, in two countries, now both in their 70s. But it also raises larger questions — about cross-border justice in the borderless European Union, and whether the father was right to try to take justice into his own hands.

Defence lawyers asked the judge yesterday to suspend the proceedings and seek a European Court of Justice ruling on whether the trial is valid.