Lebanese man convicted in slaying of Israeli diplomat to be freed from French prison

PARIS, France — A French appeals court on Thursday ordered the release of pro-Palestinian Lebanese terrorist Georges Ibrahim Abdallah, who has been imprisoned for 40 years for the 1982 killings of two foreign diplomats, including an Israeli envoy.

Abdallah, 74, is one of the longest-serving prisoners in France, where most convicts serving life sentences are freed after less than 30 years.

He has been up for release for 25 years, but the United States — a civil party to the case — has consistently opposed his leaving prison.

Abdallah was sentenced to life in prison in 1987 for his involvement in the murders of US military attache Charles Robert Ray and Israeli diplomat Yacov Barsimantov.

He has always insisted that he was a “fighter” who battled for the rights of Palestinians and not a “criminal.”

The Paris Appeals Court ordered that he be freed from a prison in the south of France next week, on Friday, July 25, on the condition that he leave French territory and never return.

Several sources before the hearing said that it was planned for him to be flown to Paris and then to Beirut.

Wounded in 1978 during Israel’s invasion of Lebanon, he joined the Marxist-Leninist PFLP, which carried out a string of plane hijackings in the 1960s and 1970s. It is banned as a terror group by the US and EU.

Then, in the late 1970s, Abdallah, a Christian, founded his terror group, the Lebanese Armed Revolutionary Factions (LARF). It made contact with other extreme-left outfits, including Italy’s Red Brigades and the German Red Army Faction (RAF).

Abdallah was captured in 1984. A French court sentenced him in 1987 to life in prison for “complicity in the assassinations” in 1982 of Charles R. Ray, a US military attaché serving in Paris, and Yacov Bar-Simantov, a second counselor at the Israeli embassy in Paris.

Bar-Simantov’s killer, a woman wearing a white beret, fled into the Paris subway after shooting him in the head in front of his wife and children at their apartment building. The diplomat was the second secretary for political affairs at the embassy.

Abdallah shot Ray, an assistant military attache, outside Ray’s apartment building the same year.

In 1984, the Lebanese Armed Revolutionary Factions claimed responsibility for the attempted assassination of US Robert O. Homme in Strasbourg. A gunman shot him five times, though Homme survived the attack.

Lebanese authorities have repeatedly said Abdallah should be freed from jail, and had written to the appeals court to say they would arrange his return home.

The detainee’s brother, Robert Abdallah, in Lebanon, told AFP he was overjoyed.

“We’re delighted. I didn’t expect the French judiciary to make such a decision nor for him to ever be freed, especially after so many failed requests for release,” he said. “For once, the French authorities have freed themselves from Israeli and US pressures.”

Prosecutors can file an appeal with France’s highest court, the Court of Cassation, but it is not expected to be processed fast enough to halt his release next week.

‘Political scandal’

Abdallah’s lawyer Jean-Louis Chalanset also welcomed the decision.

“It’s both a judicial victory and a political scandal that he was not released earlier,” he said.

In November last year, a French court ordered his release conditional on Abdallah leaving France. But France’s anti-terror prosecutors, arguing that he had not changed his political views, appealed the decision, which was consequently suspended.

A verdict was supposed to have been delivered in February, but the Paris appeals court postponed, saying it was unclear whether Abdallah had proof that he had paid compensation to the plaintiffs, something he has consistently refused to do.

The court re-examined the latest request for his release last month.

During the closed-door hearing, Abdallah’s lawyer told the judges that 16,000 euros had been placed in the prisoner’s bank account and was at the disposal of civil parties in the case, including the United States.

The Paris court has described his behavior in prison as irreproachable and said in November that he posed “no serious risk in terms of committing new terrorism acts.”

However, the US Department of Justice has asserted that his release would pose a threat to the safety of US diplomats.

Washington has also used Abdallah’s previous comments that he would return to his hometown Qobayyat on the Lebanese-Syrian border as a reason not to release him, given the recent conflict between Israel and Iran-backed terror group Hezbollah in a spillover from the Gaza war.

Abdallah still enjoys some support from several public figures in France, including left-wing members of parliament and Nobel prize-winning author Annie Ernaux. There have been protest demonstrations for his release.

In 2013, the French town of Bagnolet, east of Paris, voted to make Abdallah an honorary resident, calling him a “communist activist” and “political prisoner” who “belongs to the resistance movement of Lebanon, his country,” French media reported at the time.