The sentencing court accepted, this Friday, November 15, the eleventh request for conditional release from Lebanese pro-Palestinian activist Georges Ibrahim Abdallah. The National Anti-Terrorism Prosecutor's Office (Pnat) announced that it would appeal this decision.
He is “the oldest prisoner in the world linked to the Middle East conflict”, according to his supporters. This Friday, November 15, the sentence enforcement court accepted the eleventh request for conditional release from Lebanese pro-Palestinian activist Georges Ibrahim Abdallah. Aged 73, he had been imprisoned for forty years for complicity in the assassination of two American and Israeli diplomats.
“By decision dated today, the sentence enforcement court admitted Georges Ibrahim Abdallah to the benefit of conditional release from December 6, subject to the condition of leaving the national territory and no longer appearing there,” told AFP the national anti-terrorism prosecutor's office (Pnat), which announced it would appeal.
Co-founder of a small group responsible for four fatal attacks in France
Georges Abdallah was imprisoned in the Lannemezan penitentiary center (Hautes-Pyrénées) and had been available for release since 1999. But all his requests for release had been rejected, except one in 2013, accepted on condition that he was the subject of an arrest order. expulsion, which was however not implemented by the Minister of the Interior at the time, Manuel Valls. In 2020, Minister Gérald Darmanin also did not respond to the detainee's request.
The court's decision this Friday is not conditional on the issuance of such a decree by the government, the lawyer of the Lebanese pro-Palestinian activist, Me Jean-Louis Chalanset, rejoiced to AFP, who welcomed “a legal victory and a political victory”.
At the beginning of the 1980s, and while Lebanon was in the middle of a civil war, Georges Ibrahim Abdallah, a former professional teacher, co-founded the Lebanese Revolutionary Armed Fractions (FARL), a small pro-Syrian and anti-Israeli Marxist group which claimed five attacks , including four fatalities, in 1981-1982 in France.
