Georges Abdallah soon to be released? France's longest-serving prisoner will learn his fate on Thursday

This time could be the right one: the sentencing court and then the appeals court ruled in favor within a few months of each other, considering the length of his detention "disproportionate" to the crimes committed, and ruling that at 74 years old, this "elderly" prisoner who aspired to end his days in his village in North Lebanon no longer presented a risk of disturbing public order.

The court's November ruling was immediately suspended by an appeal from the anti-terrorism prosecutor's office. As for the court, while in February it declared itself in favor of his release, it postponed its decision for a few months, demanding that Georges Ibrahim Abdallah make a "significant effort" to compensate the victims, something he has consistently refused to do, considering himself a political prisoner.

At a new hearing on June 19, however, and without discussing his client's position or the origin of the funds, Georges Ibrahim Abdallah's lawyer informed the judges that €16,000 was now available to the civil parties in his account at Lannemezan prison (Hautes-Pyrénées), where he is being held. The public prosecutor's office, like the United States, civil parties who fiercely opposed each of his requests for release, considered that this was not enough, that he had made "no effort" because the money was not his and that there was no repentance, reported sources close to the case (the hearing was not public).

"The notion of repentance" does not exist "in French law," Georges Ibrahim Abdallah's lawyer, Jean-Louis Chalanset, had indignantly told the press. "I told the judges 'either you release him or you sentence him to death.'" It remains to be seen whether the court was convinced. If it is, and if it orders his release with immediate deportation to Lebanon. His country is ready to welcome him and has been demanding his release for years. He will empty his cell, filled with 40 years of newspapers and almost daily letters from his supporters, and take down Che Guevara's red flag from the wall. Then, according to sources close to the case, he will be transferred by military plane to Roissy airport before taking a flight to Beirut.

Georges Ibrahim Abdallah has now been forgotten, with the exception of a few left-wing parliamentarians and a handful of faithful who demonstrate annually outside his prison. On Monday evening, several dozen people gathered again in the center of Toulouse to demand his release. In the 1980s, Georges Ibrahim Abdallah was public enemy number one and one of France's most notorious prisoners.

Not because of his case, but because he was long believed, wrongly, to be behind the wave of attacks in 1985-1986 that killed 13 people, including seven at the Tati store on Rue de Rennes, and spread psychosis through the streets of the capital. The real perpetrators, pro-Iranians, were identified two months after Georges Ibrahim Abdallah was sentenced to life imprisonment.