Justice orders the release of pro-Palestinian activist Georges Abdallah, who spent half his life in prison – Libération

Imprisoned for 40 years, pro-Palestinian activist Georges Abdallah could soon find freedom. The sentencing court ordered this Friday, November 15, the release of the Lebanese man, sentenced to life imprisonment in 1987 for complicity in the assassination of two diplomats, an American and an Israeli.

“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”specified the national anti-terrorism prosecutor’s office (Pnat), which announced it would appeal.

“I am a fighter, not a criminal,” has always hammered home this man with clear eyes and a thick beard, who asked for his release for the 11th time after spending more than half his life in prison. Georges Ibrahim Abdallah was detained at the Lannemezan remand center, in the Hautes-Pyrénées, 120 kilometers from Toulouse. Now aged 73, the former teacher had been available for release since 1999. All his requests for parole had been rejected. Only one was accepted in 2013 on condition that he was subject to an expulsion order, which was not issued at the time.

The court’s decision on Friday is not conditional on the government issuing such a decree, Abdallah’s lawyer, Me Jean-Louis Chalanset, rejoiced to AFP, welcoming “a legal victory and a political victory”.

“Shame”

At the beginning of the 1980s and while Lebanon was in the middle of a civil war, Georges Abdallah co-founded the Lebanese Revolutionary Armed Fractions (FARL), a small pro-Syrian and anti-Israeli Marxist group which claimed responsibility for five attacks, including four fatalities, in 1981-1982 In France. The mobilization in favor of his release, long confined to the far left, has gradually gained momentum. The Nobel Prize for Literature Annie Ernaux notably judged, in October in the newspaper HumanityGeorges Abdallah “victim of state justice which shames France”.

The decision of the sentencing court “is obviously good news, but it is only a step, because the prosecution has just appealed”, declared to AFP Tom Martin, spokesperson for the Palestine vanquire collective. “So this good news should encourage us to develop, to expand, to intensify the support campaign, which will only stop when Georges Ibrahim Abdallah is free in his country, Lebanon,” he continued.