Scandal relates to alleged kickbacks and has been linked to bombing that killed 15

The trial of six men accused of involvement in one of France’s longest-running political scandals, linked to a suicide bombing that killed 15 people, will open in Paris on Monday.

For 17 years, judges have been attempting to unravel the “Karachi affair” in which politicians allegedly received illegal kickbacks on French arms sales abroad through a network of intermediaries.

The scandal centres on allegations of corruption at the highest levels of state and involves the reputations of several French leaders, including two former presidents, a former prime minister and government members. It is expected to run until the end of the month.

Six defendants – three politicians, two intermediaries and a retired naval company boss – are implicated in charges of corruption, fraud or complicity to fraud connected to the funding of a rightwing candidate in the 1995 French presidential campaign.

The trial centres on alleged kickbacks from two 1990s French arms contracts: the sale of frigates to Saudi Arabia and three Agosta-class submarines to Pakistan.

Fifteen people, including 11 French naval engineers, were killed in a suicide bombing in Karachi in May 2002. Pakistan blamed Islamic militants for the attack, but a French anti-terrorist judge, who has spent years investigating the killings, believes the bombing was in retaliation for France stopping the payment of bribes to Pakistan linked to an arms sale in 1994.

A second investigation centres on whether those bribes included illegal kickbacks used to fund the unsuccessful 1995 presidential campaign of the then prime minister, Édouard Balladur, a mentor to the former president Nicolas Sarkozy. As the budget minister in 1994, Sarkozy is thought to have authorised the arms sales and commissions.

Jacques Chirac won the 1995 election and stopped the alleged bribes to Pakistan by ratifying an international convention outlawing the practice of paying commissions. Relatives of those who died say Chirac would have been aware of the risk to French citizens in Pakistan from halting the payments.

Dominique Castellan, 82, the former head of a naval construction group, and Ziad Takieddine, a Franco-Lebanese businessman, will be in the dock alongside the former centre-right culture minister Renaud Donnedieu de Vabres, 65, Thierry Gaubert, 68, who worked with Sarkozy at the budget ministry, and Nicolas Bazire, Balladur’s presidential campaign director and now one of the directors of the LVMH luxury group. The sixth man, go-between Abdul Rahman Al Assir, 69, a business associate of Takieddine, is not expected to attend.

De Vabres, Gaubert and Bazire have denied knowing anything about illegal kickbacks. Gaubert has been accused of carrying suitcases of cash from kickbacks into France.

Last week, the state prosecutor said Balladur, who was the prime minister between 1993 and 1995, and his defence minister, François Léotard, would give evidence in a separate hearing, in a special court, for past and present government members on accusations of corruption surrounding the funding of Balladur’s 1995 campaign.

On Monday, the former national anti-terrorist judge Marc Trévidic said he regretted the cases had been “chopped up” and the ministers were not being tried at the same time as the others

Trévidic said the families of victims and those injured “know they won’t have all the truth, but bits of it” from this first trial.

“They want to know, particularly, if people were making money out of risking the lives of their father, husband,” Trévedic told France Info radio.