After 41 years in prison, Georges Abdallah will find freedom

Free, after more than 40 years in French prisons. The Paris Court of Appeal ordered Thursday the release of the Lebanese Georges Abdallah, sentenced in 1987 to complicity in assassinations of American and Israeli diplomats, and considered one of the oldest prisoners in the country.

The release will take place on July 25, a judicial source said at the end of the non-public hearing at the Paris courthouse, in the absence of Georges Ibrahim Abdallah, imprisoned in Lannemezan prison (Hautes-Pyrénées).

Israel “regrets”, through the voice of his embassy in Paris, the decision of French justice Thursday to release the Lebanese activist Propaletinian Georges Ibrahim Abdallah after 40 years of detention for complicity in the assassination of Israeli and American diplomats.

Georges Abdallah is a “terrorist responsible for the murders of the Israeli diplomat Yaacov Bar Siman Tov, killed before the eyes of his wife and daughter and the American diplomat Charles Ray. Such terrorists, enemies of the free world, should spend their lives in prison, “the embassy wrote in a statement.

Lebanon, on the other hand, is “extremely satisfied” with the decision of French justice on Thursday to release the Lebanese activist Propaletinian Georges Ibrahim Abdallah after 40 years of detention for complicity in the assassination of Israeli and American diplomats, his business manager in Paris told AFP.

“We have been waiting for it for a long time. He had been released for several years, “said Ziad Taan, adding that” the Lebanese state takes all the measures to organize his return with the French authorities “next week in Lebanon where he is” welcome “.

This parole is subject to a parameter: that it leaves French territory and no longer seems to it. “It is both a judicial victory and a political scandal that he was not released earlier, because of the behavior of the United States and all the successive French presidents,” reacted to the hearing hall, his lawyer, Me Jean-Louis Chalanset.

The details of its release on July 25 are not yet known. According to several sources interviewed before the hearing, it is planned that it will be taken by the police at Tarbes airport towards Roissy, where he will take a flight for Beirut. Lebanon, which has claimed its release from the French authorities for years, had written at the Court of Appeal to confirm that it would take charge of the organization of its return home.

The court’s decision may be the subject of an appeal in the prosecution of the general prosecutor’s office, but it would not be suspensive and therefore would not prevent Georges Abdallah from returning to Lebanon. But for this one and a few months apart, the court of application of the penalties then the court of appeal had spoken out to, estimating the duration of its “disproportionate” detention compared to the crimes committed, and judging that at 74, this “elderly” detainee aspiring to “finish her days” in his village in North Lebanon no longer had the risk of public order.