French court orders release of Lebanon’s Georges Ibrahim Abdallah

Abdallah was given a life sentence for his role in the murders of USA’s Charles Ray and Israeli diplomat Yacov Barsimant.

A French court has ordered the release of a Lebanese person jailed for the killings of US and Israeli diplomats in France in the early 1980s.

On Friday, prosecutors said Georges Ibrahim Abdallah, a former head of the Lebanese Armed Revolutionary Brigade, first detained in 1984 and convicted in 1987 over the 1982 murders, would be released on December 6 on the condition that he leaves France.

The office of France’s antiterrorism prosecutor has said it would appeal the decision.

Abdallah was given a life sentence in 1987 for his involvement in the murders of US diplomat Charles Ray in Paris and Israeli diplomat Yacov Barsimantov in 1982, and in the attempted murder of US Consul General Robert Homme in Strasbourg in 1984.

Requests for Abdallah’s release have been rejected and annulled multiple times, including in 2003, 2012 and 2014.

Washington has consistently opposed his release while Lebanese authorities have repeatedly said he should be freed from jail.

Abdallah, now 73, has always insisted he is a “fighter” who battled for the rights of Palestinians and not a “criminal”. This was his 11th bid for release.

He had been eligible to apply for parole since 1999 but all his previous applications had been turned down, except in 2013 when he was granted release on the condition he was expelled from France.

However, then-interior Minister Manuel Valls refused to carry out the order and Abdallah remained in jail.

The court’s decision on Friday is not conditional on the government issuing such an order, Abdallah’s lawyer, Jean-Louis Chalanset, told the AFP news agency, hailing “a legal and a political victory”.

One of France’s longest-serving inmates, Abdallah has never expressed regret for his actions.

Wounded in 1978 during Israel’s invasion of Lebanon, he joined the Marxist-Leninist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), which carried out a string of plane hijackings in the 1960s and 1970s and has been banned as a “terrorist” group by the United States and European Union.

Abdallah, a Christian, founded an armed group in the late 1970s, the Lebanese Armed Revolutionary Factions (LARF), which had contact with other far-left armed groups including Italy’s Red Brigades and the German Red Army Faction (RAF).

A pro-Syrian and anti-Israeli Marxist group, the LARF claimed responsibility for four deadly attacks in France in the 1980s.

Abdallah was first arrested in 1984 after entering a police station in Lyon and claiming that assassins from the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad were on his trail.