After 40 years behind bars, Georges Abdallah set to walk free—will politics stand in the way again?

Report by Wissam Nasrallah, English adaptation by Mariella Succar

He spent more than half his life behind bars, accused of involvement in the assassinations of American and Israeli diplomats on French soil. But to many, he is seen as a hero who dedicated his youth to a cause he believed in.

Georges Ibrahim Abdallah, the longest-held political prisoner in Europe, is set to walk free after more than 40 years behind bars.
Abdallah’s story begins during Lebanon’s civil war, when he was a young leftist with Marxist and nationalist beliefs. He saw the Palestinian resistance as a natural extension of his struggle against occupation and colonialism.

He joined the armed struggle as a member of the Lebanese Armed Revolutionary Factions (LARF), a group accused of carrying out attacks targeting Western diplomats, most notably the 1982 assassinations of U.S. military attaché Charles Ray and Israeli diplomat Yaakov Bar-Simantov in Paris.

Abdallah was arrested in 1984 in the French city of Lyon while carrying a fake Algerian passport. After three years of investigations and trials, he was sentenced to life in prison, beginning a long chapter of legal and political battles.

He has been eligible for parole for 25 years, but French authorities—under internal and international political pressure—have rejected 12 previous requests submitted by his lawyers.

Each time, the case returned to square one, despite French law allowing the conditional release of life-sentenced prisoners after a set period, especially when the prisoner demonstrates good behavior.

Nearly four decades later, a Paris appeals court has broken the stalemate, issuing a ruling to release him starting July 25, on the condition that he be immediately deported to Lebanon and permanently barred from returning to French territory.

Will this mark the final chapter in Georges Abdallah’s story, or will politics once again intervene to block his release?