On October 25, Georges Ibrahim Abdallah should get up at 4:30 in the morning, as he has done for decades. A moment of tranquility spent watching news channels in Arabic, in the Lannemezan penitentiary center (Hautes Pyrénées). At 8:30, following his morning routine, the Lebanese septuagenarian, sentenced to life in prison for complicity in the 1982 murder of two diplomats in Paris, one American and the other Israeli, will go down to the pedestrian street. yard. There he will do his daily physical exercises, before returning to his cell to take a shower, read and respond to the twenty letters he receives each day.
But this morning will not be like the others. This Friday in October will mark the fortieth “anniversary” of Georges Abdallah’s arrest. An appointment with a bitter taste for this pro-Palestinian Marxist activist, whom France has long forgotten, but whose name and face haunted, in the mid-1980s, the newsrooms, the courts and even the highest institutions of the State. The foot soldier of the shadow war that Israel and its Arab enemies were waging at the time in European capitals became, according to its defenders, “the oldest political prisoner in France and even in Europe”. His detractors, on the other hand, see him as a terrorist, proud of having killed American Lieutenant Colonel Charles R. Ray on January 18, 1982, and Yacov Barsimentov, second secretary of the Israeli embassy and probably affiliated with the Mossad, on January 3 January 1982. carried out while fighting raged between Israel and the fedayeen of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), then established in Lebanon.
Freed for a quarter of a century, the founder of the Lebanese Revolutionary Armed Fractions (FARL), a small group close to Georges Habache’s Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, has never been released, despite eleven requests in this regard since 2001. All were dismissed in the first instance, on appeal or in cassation, on the grounds that the interested party never regretted his actions, that he refused to compensate the families of the two victims and that his return to Lebanon would constitute a danger. An argument deployed in a context of pressure from the United States and interference by public authorities in the procedure. The only time the French justice system validated the Lannemezan veteran’s request for parole on appeal, in 2013, the Ministry of the Interior, then under the auspices of the socialist Manuel Valls, hindered it by refusing to issue the required expulsion order. by the magistrates.
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