The Homecoming 'Militant'/Terrorist Hero

"This is a victory for justice, but it is also a political scandal that he was not released before, thanks to the behaviour of the United States and successive French presidents."

"He seemed very happy about his upcoming release, even though he knows he is returning to the Middle East in an extremely tough context for Lebanese and Palestinian populations."

Jean-Louis Chalanset, lawyer for Georges Ibrahim Abdallah

 

"[The FARL --Lebanese Revolutionary Armed Factions -- long disbanded Marxist anti-Zionist group] had not committed a violent action since 1984."

"[Abdallah] today represented a past symbol of the Palestinian struggle."

"[Appeals judges found the length of  his detention] disproportionate [to the crimes ... and given his age]."

French Appeals Court

 

"The United States opposes the release of convicted terrorist Georges Ibrahim Abdallah."

"His release not only endangers the safety of U.S. diplomats abroad, but also betrays the memory of the victims and their families."

U.S. Embassy, Paris  

Abdallah was eventually released from Lannemezan prison in southern France in the early hours of Friday  AFP

 He has the reputation of being the inmate in  French prison who has logged the longest incarceration rate -- 40 years -- for his terrorist past, as a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and later the founder of the Marxist, anti-Israel Lebanese Revolutionary Armed Factions (FARL). But it was his involvement in the assassination of two diplomats that had him incarcerated at Lannemezan prison. In France, inmates serving life sentences typically serve fewer than 30 years. This man was an exception.

 

Detained in 1984, sentenced to life in prison in 1987 for the murders of U.S. military attache Charles Robert Ray, and Israeli diplomat Yacov Barsimantov in Paris, he was finally released from prison on July 25 with the proviso that he immediately leave France. In the early morning hours a convoy of six vehicles left the Lannemezan penitentiary, lights flashing. He returned to Lebanon, to the village that is his family home, and was greeted with pride and honour.   

 

Georges, seen here between two police officers, was convicted in the 1980s  Getty Images

 

 At age 74, he is prepared to once again take up the banner of defending Palestinian rights, accompanied with the propaganda formula that Israel  abuses those rights. In lock-step with Palestinian terrorists of the present time, he repeats charges of Israeli genocide, the starvation of Palestinian children, the trampling of the Palestinians by an Israeli aggressor, oppressing the people of Palestine. 

 

Eligible for release since 1999, his requests were denied when the United States, as a civil party to the case, consistently opposed his leaving prison. Once he was discharged from prison, Abdallah ws to be transported to the Tarbes airport. There, a police plane was scheduled to fly him to Roissey for a further flight on to Beirut. 

 

A demonstration outside the Lannemezan prison calling for the release of Lebanese national Georges Ibrahim Abdallah, founder of the Lebanese Armed Revolutionary Factions (LARF) and former PFLP member jailed for life in 1987 for complicity in the killing of US and Israeli diplomats in 1982, in Lannemezan, south-western France, on October 26, 2024. (Valentine Chapuis / AFP)

 

During Israel's invasion of Lebanon, Abdallah had been wounded in 1978. He joined the Marxist-Leninist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, when a string of plane hijackings in the 1960s and 1970s were taking place. The PLFP is banned as a terrorist group by the United States and the European Union, along with other Western countries. In the late 1970s, Abdallah, though a Christian, founded his LARF group, in contact with other extreme left-wing groups such as Italy's Red Brigades the the German Red Army Faction (RAF).

Abdallah, interviewed by AFP at the detention centre before his release, stated that for over four decades he had continued to be a 'militant with a struggle'. And evidently this is what he is now returning to. French police had discovered sub-machine guns and transceiver stations in one of his Paris apartments after  his arrest in 1984. But his Lebanese Revolutionary Armed Factions that he founded has been long disbanded. 

 

He will doubtless find other ways to make an impact defending the Palestinian right to continue slaughtering Jews on their way to taking possession of the land Israel stands on, for a Greater Palestine. 

 

KOBAYAT: Lebanese army soldiers stand guard as pro-Palestinian Lebanese terrorist Georges Ibrahim Abdallah, 74, prepares to give a press conference upon his arrival in his village of Kobayat in Lebanon’s northern Akkar region on July 25, 2025, after serving more than 40 years in jail in France. – AFP