Georges Ibrahim Abdallah will still have to wait a few weeks, three months at most, to find out if he is definitively released by the French justice system after forty years of detention. To everyone's surprise, including his lawyer and his support committee, the anti-terrorism sentencing court ordered, on Friday, November 15, the release of the prisoner for terrorism, now 73 years old.
This release should have taken place from December 6, but the National Anti-Terrorism Prosecutor's Office (PNAT) appealed the decision of the sentence enforcement judges. The latter set only one condition for the release of Mr. Abdallah: that he permanently leaves French territory as soon as he leaves the prison in Lannemezan (Hautes-Pyrénées). What the Lebanese embassy in Paris is committed to and what the prisoner wants. The PNAT's appeal being suspensive, the fate of Mr. Abdallah is once again uncertain.
Arrested in 1984 in Lyon, Georges Ibrahim Abdallah, founder of the Lebanese Revolutionary Armed Forces (FARL), a small anti-Zionist and anti-imperialist Lebanese Marxist group active in the early 1980s, was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1987 for his complicity in the assassination of the American military attaché Charles R. Ray, in Paris in January 1982, then in that of Yacov Barsimentov, an Israeli diplomat, in April of the same year. He was also found guilty of complicity in the assassination attempt against Robert Homme, consul general of the United States in Strasbourg, in 1984. Mr. Abdallah disputes the facts but accepts these actions.
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Georges Ibrahim Abdallah has been free since 1999, but his ten previous requests had failed, notably in 2003, when the Minister of Justice at the time Dominique Perben asked the prosecution to appeal a first release decision, then, in 2013, when Manuel Valls, then Minister of the Interior, refused to issue an expulsion order for Mr. Abdallah, a sine qua non condition set by the judges for release. Washington had relayed, through Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, to the French executive its wish to see him remain in prison.
A model inmate but without remorse
Me Jean-Louis Chalanset, Mr. Abdallah's lawyer, greets “a legal victory and a political victory”. However, he remains mobilized due to the call. “That the PNAT appeals is not surprising, since they want him to die in prison”denounced the lawyer.
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