A Bulgarian court on Monday sentenced two men, involved in the deadly 2012 bus bomb attack on Israeli tourists at the country’s Burgas airport, to life in prison.

The bombing in July 2012 killed five Israelis, including a pregnant woman, their Bulgarian bus driver, and the Franco-Lebanese who carried the explosive, and injured over 35 people.

It was the deadliest attack against Israelis abroad since 2004.

Both Bulgarian and Israeli authorities had blamed the Lebanese Shiite movement Hezbollah for the bombing, which led to a subsequent European Union decision to blacklist Hezbollah’s military wing as a “terrorist” organisation.

Judge Adelina Ivanova sentenced the two men — identified as Lebanese-Australian Meliad Farah, 31 at the time of the attack, and Lebanese-Canadian Hassan El Hajj Hassan, 24,  — to “life in jail without parole”, finding them guilty of terrorism and manslaughter.

The two were put on trial in absentia in January 2018 for a terrorist attack and manslaughter but were never tracked down.

According to an investigation into the bombing, they arrived in Bulgaria from Romania in June 2012, and left again on the evening after the attack.

Priorly, DNA analysis identified the bomber as 23-year-old Franco-Lebanese national Mohamad Hassan El-Husseini.

In the airport CCTV footage, he was seen wandering inside the airport’s arrivals hall with a backpack shortly before the explosion that tore through a bus outside the terminal that was headed to Sunny Beach, a popular summer destination on the Black Sea.

According to witness accounts, he was trying to put his backpack inside the luggage compartment of the bus full of Israelis when it exploded.

The tourists who were killed were all in their twenties, except for a pregnant 42-year-old woman.

Prosecutors were left in a dilemma if the explosive was triggered by the bomber or remotely detonated by one of two men, who had also helped him to assemble the explosive device.

Countering the argument, a public defender for Hassan, lawyer Zhanet Zhelyazkova, said that evidence for her client’s alleged complicity with the attack was “only circumstantial.”

However, Shtarkelova affirmed that the nature of the explosive device, the fake US driver’s licences used by the two men, their Lebanese descent and some family ties “link both defendants (…) and the attack to the terrorist organisation Hezbollah.”

The investigation into the attack found that the fake licences were made by the same printer at a university in Lebanon. It also uncovered that the suspects received money from people linked to Hezbollah.

In recent comments on the case, Bulgaria’s chief prosecutor Ivan Geshev stressed that Hezbollah was behind the attack “in terms of logistics and financing”.

The prosecution confirmed that it had no clue about the two men’s whereabouts and that they are still sought on an Interpol red notice.

The court ruling is still subject to appeal to a higher court.