Georges Abdallah: After 40 years behind bars, the Lebanese man will leave his French prison on Friday

"The pass was signed" by the Lebanese authorities and recovered by the French authorities on Tuesday, said Ziad Taan, chargé d'affaires of the Lebanese embassy, who has been calling on France for Georges Abdallah's release for years. His relatives are holding a press conference in Beirut on Wednesday afternoon. The Paris Court of Appeal ordered his release last Thursday, "as of July 25," on the condition that he leave French territory and never return. He had been eligible for release since 1999 but had previously seen his dozen requests for release fail, making him one of the country's longest-serving detainees.

Journalists met him the afternoon of the decision, accompanying LFI MP Andrée Taurinya, who came to visit him in his cell, the walls of which were covered with a red Che Guevara flag, a world map, and pro-Palestinian stickers. "Forty years is a long time, but you don't feel it when there's a dynamic of struggle," Georges Abdallah assured. The length of his detention is "disproportionate" to the crimes committed and given the age—74—of the former leader of the FARL (Lebanese Revolutionary Armed Factions), the appeals court judges ruled.

This small group of Lebanese Christian Marxists, long since dissolved, has "not committed any violent action since 1984," the court also recalled, seeing in Georges Abdallah a "past symbol of the Palestinian struggle." While regretting that he has not "evolved" or expressed "regret or compassion for the victims he considers enemies," the judges considered that Georges Abdallah, who wants to "end his days" in his village in northern Lebanon, perhaps by engaging in local politics, no longer represents a risk of disturbing public order.

At the time of the events, in the context of the Lebanese Civil War and the Israeli invasion of South Lebanon in 1978, the FARL targeted the interests of Israel and its American ally abroad. Before the arrest of Georges Abdallah in 1984, the group had struck five times in France, killing two diplomats in 1982: American Lieutenant Colonel Charles Ray, then Israeli Yacov Barsimantov, considered the head of the Mossad in France, shot dead by a woman in front of his wife and two children.

Only Georges Abdallah appeared at the Paris courthouse, identified by his fingerprints discovered in a Parisian hideout packed with explosives and weapons, including the pistol used in the two assassinations. The former schoolteacher has always denied his involvement while refusing to condemn "acts of resistance" against "Israeli and American oppression." In 1987, he was sentenced to life imprisonment, in a unique context: at the time of his trial, he had become public enemy number one and France's most famous prisoner, wrongly believed to be behind the wave of attacks in 1985-1986 that left 13 dead and spread psychosis through the streets of Paris.