The trial of a Czech man accused of murdering his country’s leading scholar of Jewish history began in Prague on Tuesday, according to local media.

Twenty nine year old Dalibor Škopán stands accused of stabbing to death historian Jiří Fiedler, 78, whose body was found alongside that of his wife Dagmar in their Prague apartment last March.

Fiedler, who was not Jewish, began documenting Jewish heritage sites in what is now the Czech Republic in the 1970s, riding his bicycle to remote towns and villages to photograph and describe abandoned Jewish cemeteries and former synagogues, rabbis’ homes, Jewish schools and other sites that stood in ruins or were transformed for other use.

His work aroused the suspicion of the authorities, and more than once he was called in by the secret police because of his activities. Only after the fall of communism could Fielder publish his 1992 book “Jewish Sites of Bohemia and Moravia.” His work has been transferred into an electronic database of Jewish heritage in the Czech Republic that is constantly being updated.

Arrested this February after a nearly year-long manhunt, Škopán was reported to have confessed almost immediately.

According to popular Czech news site novinky.cz, Škopán connected with the researcher by expressing an interest in Jewish history and was planning on asking for financial help during the visit during which the murder took place.

During a discussion of Ukrainian synagogues, Škopán left to relieve himself before returning with a kitchen knife. After the killing he stole some of their Jewelry and books, the website reported, adding that he had subsequently expressed interest in making a pilgrimage to Rome to seek absolution from the Pope.

“We are feeling his loss very painfully to this day,” Tomas Kraus, the executive director of the Federation of Jewish Communities in the Czech Republic told The Jerusalem Post.

“When he tragically died - and the circumstances are beyond our comprehension - he left a huge gap in our knowledge of Jewish history in our country which will be very difficult to fill. We can only appreciate that his work for the Jewish Museum in Prague and for the Czech Jewish community at large in these past years in freedom since the 1990s enabled us to benefit from his deep, wide and profound experience. Needless to say that we are missing him as a friend, colleague, decent scholar and a warm human being. The trial with his murderer will not change our sadness.”