Hugh Scofield
Paris correspondent
AFP
Georges Abdallah will be released on Friday 40 years after Bars
Georges Abdallah, a 74-year-old Lebanese teacher who became a leftist symbol of the Palestinian cause, was released by France on Friday in a prison for 41 years.
His lawyers described him as “the man who spent the longest time in prison due to events related to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,” Abdallah was scheduled to leave the prison in southern France early on Friday and fly directly to Beirut.
In 1987, he was found guilty of accomplice in the murders of two French diplomats. One American, one Israeli – Abdallah was gradually forgotten by more and more public.
However, his release continued to be the cause for Marxist leftist activists.
His stern, bearded face continued to peer through the banner in a left-wing demonstration. And once a year, protesters gathered to demand his freedom outside the prisons of the Pyrenees. Three left-led French municipalities have declared him an “honorary citizen.”
Although he was eligible for parole since 1999, he declined consecutive requests for freedom. Supporters say this was due to pressure on the French government from the US and Israel.
Recently interviewed by French news agency AFP in his cell at the Rannemazan prison, he said he was protecting his sanity by focusing on the “struggle” of Palestinians.
“If I didn’t have it… well, 40 years – it can make your brain mushy,” he said.
On the wall of his bunch, Abdallah took postcard photos from the innovative 1960s Che Guevara and supporters around the world. The desk was covered in a pile of newspapers.
AFP
Septuagenarian has a postcard from a supporter and a photo of Che Guevara on the wall of his mobile phone
Born in 1951 to a Christian family in northern Lebanon in the late 1970s, Abdallah helped establish the Lebanese armed revolutionary fact (LARF), a small Marxist group dedicated to fighting Israel and its closest ally, the United States.
At the time, Lebanon was caught up in a civil war. In 1978 and 1982, Israel invaded South Lebanon and invaded to fight Palestinian fighters based there.
Abdallah’s group decided to hit Israeli and US targets in Europe and carried out five attacks in France. In 1982, its members shot and killed Charles Ley, a diplomat from Strasbourg, and Yakokh Barsimantov from Israeli diplomat in Paris. Additionally, the car bomb that denounced the LARF killed two French bombs.
Abdallah was arrested in Lyon in 1984. The French intelligence officer took the lead and he surrendered himself to the police station, thinking that Israeli assassins were ongoing. Initially, he was only charged with having a false passport and a crime association.
A while later, French citizens were lured in northern Lebanon, and the French Secret Service joined in negotiations to design the exchange via Algeria.
The French citizens were released, but just before Abdallah was released, police in Paris found a cache of weapons in his flat. This made his release impossible.
Two years later, after reaching his trial, Paris was seen in the middle of a terrorist attack that killed 13 people. These were condemned by politicians and the media regarding Abdallah’s allies who were trying to pressure France to free him. Later it was established that they were actually the work of Lebanese Shiite group Hezbollah under the direction of Iran.
At trial, Abdallah denied any involvement in the murder, but defended their legitimacy. He was given life sentence.
Getty Images
Georges, seen here between two policemen, was convicted in the 1980s.
Of the more than 10 requests released since 1999, only one approached success. However, in 2013, then-US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton wrote that he expressed his hope to the French government that he could find the “legality” of the “legality” of the court’s decision to release Abdallah.
Her message was later published by WikiLeaks.
Interior Minister Manuel Valz later refused to sign an expulsion order, which had been accidental for Abdallah’s release.
This year, the Court of Appeals determined that the length of detention in Abdallah was “unbalanced” and poses no longer a threat. He said again that his release must be expelled from France soon.
“It’s a victory for justice, but it’s also a political scandal that he had not been released before, thanks to the actions of the US and past French presidents.”
Among those who campaigned for his release was 2022 Nobel Prize in Literature, Annie Elneau. He said he was “a victim of national justice that France should be ashamed of.”
The Intelligence Director, the Intelligence Director, who was trying to negotiate an exchange of Abdallah in 1985 and is now a member of the far-right National Rally, said he was “a worse than a serial killer,” and that “the US had stuck him in prison.”
According to a report by the Le Monde newspaper, Palestinian prisoners have not served in prison for more than 40 years, even prisoners sentenced to life in Israel. Abdallah served 41.
