The former“revolutionary lebanese Georges Ibrahim Abdallahsentenced to life imprisonment in 1987 for complicity in the murder of two diplomats, is to be released after spending more than half his life in prison.

“I’m a fighter, not a criminal”.This man, with his clear eyes and thick beard, has always insisted, and this is the 11th time he has asked for his release, a request on which the courts ruled on Friday.

The sentence enforcement court accepted the eleventh request for parole of Lebanese pro-Palestinian activist Georges Ibrahim Abdallah, imprisoned for 40 years for complicity in murder and eligible for release since 1999, the national anti-terrorist prosecutor’s office (Pnat) told AFP, announcing that it would appeal.

“By decision dated today, the sentence enforcement court has admitted Georges Ibrahim Abdallah to the benefit of conditional release as of December 6, subject to the condition of leaving the national territory and not appearing there again.”said the Pnat in a press release.

Born on April 2, 1951 in Koubayat (northern Lebanon), this Christian of the Greek Orthodox rite joined the Syrian Popular Party at the age of 15, a formation that favored a “Greater Syria including Lebanon and Palestine. Wounded during Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1978, he joined the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, the communist and anti-imperialist movement of Georges Habache.

Communist, anti-imperialist and pro-Palestinian

Together with his brothers and cousins, the taciturn schoolteacher went on to found the Lebanese Revolutionary Armed Factions (FARL). He already had contacts with movements considered terrorist: Direct Action (France), Red Brigades (Italy), Venezuelan Carlos and Red Army Faction (Germany).

A Marxist, pro-Syrian, anti-Israeli group, FARL claimed responsibility for five attacks in France in 1981-1982, including four fatal ones.

The conditions of Abdallah’s arrest are unprecedented. On October 24, 1984, he entered a police station in Lyon, asking for protection from the Mossad killers he claimed were on his trail. At the time, he held an Algerian passport, having previously held Maltese, Moroccan and Yemeni passports, useful for his many travels (Yugoslavia, Italy, Spain, Switzerland, Cyprus…). But the DST soon realized that the man with perfect French was not a tourist, but Abdel Kader Saadi, “nom de guerre” of Abdallah. In one of his apartments in Paris, an arsenal was discovered, including machine pistols and two-way radios.

Sentenced in 1986 in Lyon to four years’ imprisonment for criminal conspiracy and possession of arms and explosives, he was tried the following year by the Paris Special Assize Court for complicity in the 1982 assassination of two diplomats, the American Charles Ray and the Israeli Yacov Barsimentov, and the attempted assassination of a third in 1984.

Abdallah denies, reaffirms that he is not “nothing but an Arab fighter”. but was sentenced to life imprisonment, the public prosecutor having requested ten years’ imprisonment.

In his memoirs, Georges Kiejmanlawyer for the civil parties, speaks of a defendant behaving “like the militant terrorist he said he was not”.. “He insulted everyone, called us +pigs+ and +imperialist slobs+, he had to be ejected from the courtroom.”.

His lawyer, Jacques Vergèssees in the verdict “a declaration of war. A support committee was immediately set up, requesting his “immediate release”..

Now one of France’s longest-serving inmates, imprisoned in Lannemezan (south-west France), he has never expressed the slightest regret. “He’s doing well intellectually. He’s a militant, he sticks to his positions, reads a lot and keeps very up to date with what’s going on in the Middle East. We write to him from all over the world”.his lawyer Jean-Louis Chalanset told AFP in 2022.

Since 1999, the year he became eligible for release, all his parole applications have been rejected except one, in 2013, but on condition that he be deported, which was not implemented by the then Interior Minister, Manuel Valls.

“Political prisoner

Over the years, his fate has moved and mobilized activists close to the French Communist Party (PCF) and the far left, who accuse successive governments of persecution and consider him to be an “enemy of the state”. “a political prisoner”.. Communist municipalities even made him an honorary citizen, and regular demonstrations were held outside his prison.

“Georges Ibrahim Abdallah is a victim of a state justice system that shames France”.denounced in October in the daily L’Humanité writer Annie Ernaux, winner of the 2022 Nobel Prize for Literature.

“On a personal level, I believe that Georges Ibrahim Abddallah could be released”.said Me Kiejman in 2021. “I have a kind of respect for him”. now and “the assize court brawler has become a thoughtful intellectual”even if, “locked in a respectable but dogmatic certainty, he does nothing to facilitate his liberation”.