Georges Ibrahim Abdallah will still have to wait a few weeks, three months at most, to find out if French justice will definitively release him after forty years of detention. To the surprise of everyone, including his lawyer and his support committee, the anti-terrorist sentencing court ordered, on Friday, November 15, the release of France’s oldest terrorism prisoner, now 73 years old.
This release should have taken place on December 6, but the National Anti-Terrorist Prosecutor’s Office (PNAT) appealed the decision of the sentencing judges. The latter only imposes one condition for Mr. Abdallah’s release: that he definitively leave French territory as soon as he leaves the Lannemezan prison (Hautes-Pyrénées). What the Lebanese embassy in Paris is committed to and what the prisoner wants. Since the PNAT appeal is suspensive, Mr. Abdallah’s fate 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 murder. of the American military attaché Charles R. Ray, in Paris in January 1982, then that of Yacov Barsimentov, diplomat Israeli, in April of the same year. He was also found guilty of complicity in the attempted murder of Robert Homme, the United States Consul General in Strasbourg, in 1984. Mr. Abdallah denies the facts, but accepts them.
Georges Ibrahim Abdallah has been free since 1999, but his eleven previous requests had failed, notably in 2003, when the Minister of Justice, Dominique Perben, asked the prosecution to appeal a first release decision, and then in 2013, when Manuel Valls, then Interior Minister, had refused to issue an order for the expulsion of Mr. Abdallah, on the condition that sine qua non The judges requested his release. Washington had conveyed, through Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, to the French executive its desire for him to remain in prison.
A model inmate but without regrets
METROmy Jean-Louis Chalanset, Mr. Abdallah’s lawyer, greets “a legal victory and a political victory”. However, he remains mobilized at the call of the National Anti-Terrorist Prosecutor’s Office. “That the PNAT appeals is not surprising, since they want him to die in prison”the lawyer denounced.
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