Terrorist Georges Abdallah is to be released from prison after forty years of imprisonment. The Left is hailing the “liberation” of a “resistance fighter,” while the Right is outraged that a dangerous man is once again free, benefiting from numerous political and media supporters.
Following a court ruling, Georges Ibrahim Abdallah, a Marxist and pro-Palestinian Lebanese terrorist who has been in prison since 1987 and is now 74 years old, will be released on Tuesday, July 25th.
At the time of his conviction, he was sentenced to life imprisonment for complicity in the 1982 assassination of two diplomats, one American and the other Israeli. After twelve years in captivity, he began to request early release, which was systematically denied until now. He has since become known as one of France’s longest-serving prisoners.
In November, the sentencing court finally ruled that the length of his detention was “disproportionate” to the crimes committed and that, given his age and his desire to retire to a small village in northern Lebanon, he no longer posed a threat to public order. The anti-terrorism prosecutor’s office appealed the decision, but the Paris Court of Appeal, in its final ruling, upheld the release. However, one condition was imposed: that Georges Abdallah agree to make a “substantial effort” to compensate the victims—something he had always refused to do, considering himself not a terrorist but a “political prisoner.”
In June, Abdallah’s lawyer announced that the sum of €16,000 had been raised by his client—without commenting on the terms or source of the money—and that he was therefore ready to be released. The public prosecutor’s office and the American civil parties protested on the grounds that the money clearly did not belong to him and that there was no form of “repentance” on his part. Unfortunately, the notion of ‘repentance’ has no legal existence in French law, and the release will therefore go ahead.
Abdallah has always refused to admit his involvement in the deaths of the two diplomats and has always described these two assassinations as acts of “resistance” against “Israeli and American oppression” in the context of the Lebanese civil war and the Israeli invasion of southern Lebanon in 1978. At the time of his conviction, his name was particularly well-known in France, as he had also been linked—wrongly in this case—to the Rue de Rennes attacks that killed 14 people in central Paris in 1986. Today, almost no one in France remembers him, apart from the small circle of pro-Palestinian far-left activists who have made him a martyr and embellished his image as a “political prisoner.”
The announcement of his release was greeted with great fanfare by several leading figures of the French far left. Mathilde Panot, leader of La France Insoumise in the National Assembly, expressed her “immense relief” and praised the mobilisation of LFI activists who played “their part” in his release, enthusiastically supported by activist Rima Hassan. Éric Coquerel, chairman of the finance committee in the assembly, welcomed the release of the “world’s longest-serving political prisoner,” describing Abdallah’s actions as “acts of resistance.” Some months ago he explained on the national channel TF1 that the label “terrorist” could evolve over time and drew a parallel between Georges Abdallah and Nelson Mandela.
On the Right, however, there is consternation. Abdallah is remembered for his membership in the FARL (Lebanese Armed Revolutionary Factions), a small group responsible for a wave of bombings in Paris in the early 1980s. Rassemblement National’s Jordan Bardella expressed his “nausea” at the idea of Abdallah’s release, which constitutes a form of rehabilitation of terrorism. “Calling him a political prisoner is unbearable,” also protested Judge Eric Halphen.
The Israeli Embassy in France condemned the French court’s decision in a statement. In Lebanon, the man is already awaited as a hero.
