The prison gates hadn’t even closed behind Georges Ibrahim Abdallah, but French public opinion was already bitterly divided.
On Friday, July 25, 2025, the 74-year-old Lebanese prisoner walked free after more than 40 years spent in French prisons for complicity in the murder of Israeli and U.S. diplomats. When his release was announced on July 17, politicians and pundits quickly rushed to frame the story: Was it a long-overdue legal decision, or a surrender to ideology?
The question — once a “terrorist,” always a terrorist? — has hovered over Abdallah for four decades, not least because many do not believe he ever was one. Now, with his release, that question has returned with force, in full view of a public that, until last week, had mostly forgotten the man behind the headlines, but remains haunted by the memory of the 2015 Paris attacks, claimed by the Islamic State group, in which 130 people were murdered.
On one side are those who still view Abdallah as the “public enemy number one” of the 1980s, an unrepentant terrorist whose freedom threatens national security and France’s alliances with the U.S. and Israel. On the other are lawyers, activists and leftist politicians who call Abdallah “Europe’s oldest political prisoner” and argue that the inconsistencies in his case raise deeper questions — about justice, sovereignty, prejudice and the very language we use to define political violence.
Born in 1951 to a Maronite Christian family in northern Lebanon, Abdallah worked as a schoolteacher before he turned to politics. He was active in the Syrian Social Nationalist Party and joined the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine after being wounded during Israel’s 1978 invasion of Lebanon.
One year later, and four years into the Lebanese civil war, Abdallah co-founded the Lebanese Armed Revolutionary Factions (LARF), a Marxist-Leninist, anti-imperialist group. Its methods were brutal, its target list political: U.S. and Israeli executives stationed abroad.
In 1982, LARF claimed responsibility for the assassinations of the U.S. military attache Charles Ray and the Israeli diplomat Yacov Barsimantov in Paris. Later that year, LARF planted a car bomb, intended for another Israeli diplomat, which detonated near a high school in Paris, injuring 51 people, including children. Then, in 1984, a failed attempt targeted the U.S. Consul Robert O. Homme in Strasbourg.
In October 1984, convinced he was being followed by Israel’s Mossad in Lyon, Abdallah entered a police station. In reality, French intelligence had been tailing him after one of his associates had been caught at the Italian-Yugoslav border with 15 pounds of explosives. Abdallah was taken into custody.
In early 1985, just as he was about to be traded for a French hostage in Lebanon, the press revealed that investigators had found weapons and explosives — including the gun used in the 1982 assassinations — in a Paris hideout that bore Abdallah’s fingerprints. The deal collapsed.
In 1986, he was sentenced to four years in prison for weapons possession, criminal conspiracy and passport fraud. Nearly two years of his sentence had already been served.
A second trial followed in 1987, this time for complicity in the two assassinations. The U.S. had pushed for a harsher sentence, and CIA Director William Casey himself had interceded to demand life imprisonment. Abdallah’s original lawyer, who had admitted to passing information about his client to French intelligence, was replaced.
While Abdallah awaited trial, Paris was reeling from a wave of bombings unprecedented since the Algerian War. Across Europe, this was the height of the “years of lead,” in which ultraleft and neo-fascist groups alike staged a series of violent attacks, with motivations as varied as Basque and Corsican independence, anti-modernism and anti-egalitarianism. In the late 1980s, Arab and pro-Palestinian militant groups joined in, taking the struggle against Israeli colonialism directly to its Western supporters.
Between December 1985 and September 1986, 13 people were killed in Paris and over 250 injured. An obscure “Committee of Solidarity with Arab and Middle Eastern Political Prisoners” had claimed responsibility for most of the Paris attacks and demanded the release of three men detained in France — including Abdallah.
To make matters worse, several observers believed that they had recognized Abdallah’s brothers at the sites of the attacks. Despite an Associated Press journalist and several local witnesses reporting that the brothers hadn’t left Lebanon in years, the French press overwhelmingly fixated on what became known as the “Abdallah clan.” Photos of his brothers, posted in metro stations and police precincts across the country with a million-franc bounty — the equivalent of $350,000 today — made their way across the Atlantic and into the columns of The New York Times.
The true perpetrators of the attacks, pro-Iranian militants, would be identified two months after Abdallah was handed his verdict. But by the time the trial started, public perception had already been shaped and Abdallah’s image as a terrorist was set. He walked in as France’s symbolic enemy number one.
“Psychosis,” according to a 2025 report on the Abdallah saga published by the Agence France-Presse, “had set in.”
Throughout the February 1987 trial, the courtroom was under lockdown, braced for possible attacks.
Abdallah denied any involvement in the 1985-86 attacks, which had occurred while he was already in prison. “I am an Arab fighter,” he said, “not a criminal.” He never denied his ties to LARF, but rejected direct involvement in the 1982 assassinations and the 1984 assassination attempt against U.S. and Israeli diplomats. “Even if the people did not grant me the honor of participating in the anti-imperialist actions you attribute to me,” he told the court before walking out, never to return until his verdict, “I at least have the honor of being accused of them — and of defending their legitimacy against the criminal legitimacy claimed by the executioners.”
The U.S. government, which, in a rare move, had joined the trial as a civil party, did not take kindly to this statement, nor to Abdallah’s lack of remorse. They had appointed the renowned criminal lawyer Georges Kiejman to fight for a life sentence — a rare punishment that, as of 2025, has been given to only 1% of the prison population in France. Though the prosecutor had only asked for a 10-year sentence, Abdallah was indeed sentenced to life in prison.
In the days following the verdict, L’Humanite, France’s communist newspaper, published reports from the trial (“driven from start to finish by and for a foreign power”) and editorials (“everything was done to associate the name of Abdallah with terrorism in the minds of the French”).
At the time, L’Humanite was virtually alone in raising concerns about political interference in the Abdallah trial and suggesting he might not be the one behind the attacks. But in the intervening years, even those who had contributed to portraying Abdallah as a linchpin in the string of attacks recognized that errors had been made.
In a 1996 book, the former French Security Minister Robert Pandraud admitted that he and Interior Minister Charles Pasqua had focused on Abdallah not because of evidence but because they had no better lead — and despite, he said, “knowing full well that, to the French, all bearded men from the Middle East look the same.”
Edwy Plenel, co-founder of investigative site Mediapart, who was then a journalist at Le Monde and wrote a series of pieces describing Abdallah as a “professional terrorist,” later called the theory linking the Lebanese prisoner to the 1985-86 bombings an “error, and a major one.”
“There is a glaring disproportionality,” Yves Bonnet, the former head of the French domestic intelligence agency (DST), said in 2012, “between the crime and the sentence. It is not worthy of France. It’s time to put an end to this story.”
By 1999, Abdallah had served the minimum time required on his life sentence and was eligible for release.
In 2007, one of his early parole attempts was blocked due to a 2005 DST note claiming that he had converted to Islam and engaged in Islamic proselytism in prison — a claim that Bonnet later called an “inadmissible lie.” Yet it was one that, in the post-9/11 world, proved convincing.
In 2013, after over 14 years of failed parole attempts, a French court finally approved Abdallah’s conditional release, pending deportation to Lebanon. The expulsion order needed only a signature from then-Interior Minister Manuel Valls, a socialist. Abdallah’s lawyer, Jacques Vergès, was ecstatic: “I welcome this decision with satisfaction,” he told AFP, “as I had asked the French justice system to stop behaving like a whore toward its American pimp.”
Within 24 hours of the court decision, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius. According to diplomatic cables later made public by WikiLeaks, she urged his government to “find another basis to contest the legality of the decision.” Valls complied and withheld the signature.
In what many observers have called the “Abdallah exception,” the Lebanese prisoner was never considered for a swap or political pardon. Unlike other political prisoners from the years of lead — members of the far-left militant organization Action Directe, Basque nationalists or Corsican ones — who were released through diplomatic swaps or presidential pardons, Abdallah never got out.
Not even the COVID-19 pandemic would set him free — despite the French justice minister ordering the release of 13,500 prisoners who, like Abdallah, had served most or all of their sentences. Terrorists — or those perceived as such — were exempt from said release, and Abdallah stayed put.
The same story repeated over the next decade. Each parole request sparked a reaction from Washington, sometimes from Israel and, each time, French governments — left and right — quietly aligned with foreign expectations.
Over time, Abdallah disappeared into the maze of the French judicial and prison systems. The only circles expressing concern about the endless imprisonment of convict number 2388/A221 were the pro-Palestinian fringes of the radical left.
But every Oct. 25, on the anniversary of his incarceration, hundreds — sometimes thousands — of supporters gathered outside the Lannemezan prison, near France’s border with Spain, demanding his release.
In 2024, amid rising protests over Israel’s crimes in Gaza and growing scrutiny of Western complicity, Abdallah’s name began circulating again — at protests, in op-eds and on both sides of the political spectrum.
Parliamentarians from the hard-left La France Insoumise (LFI) and Communist parties visited his 96-square-foot cell. The French Nobel laureate Annie Ernaux joined foreign intellectuals from Noam Chomsky to Angela Davis in publicly asking for Abdallah’s release, decrying a “political justice that shames France.” And across the country, right-wing politicians called on towns and regions to ban rallies calling for the liberation of a “terrorist.”
So divided is the country on the question of whether Abdallah is a “terrorist” or a “political prisoner” that there has hardly been a debate on the inhumanity — and illegality — of life sentences without the possibility of release; sentences that, as of 2021, violate the European Convention on Human Rights.
When the Paris Court of Appeal approved Abdallah’s release on July 17, 2025, it was not a gesture of absolution. The court cited his age, the lack of recent threats, the fact that the LARF was now dissolved and has not committed violent actions since 1984, and Abdallah’s agreement (after years of flat-out refusal) to pay the $18,546 owed in compensation to the civil parties. Abdallah’s release was conditional on leaving for Lebanon immediately and never returning to France.
Most of the French left seemed to rejoice at the news. The Green Party leader Marine Tondelier celebrated the “liberation of militant Georges Ibrahim Abdallah.” Mathilde Panot, leader of the LFI in the National Assembly, expressed her “immense relief” in a statement on X, thanked those who stood by “France’s oldest political prisoner” and, of course, made sure to shout out to her own party members (municipal elections are, after all, in eight months).
Both statements were flagged with community notes for “omitting” references to the 1982 “terror attacks” and the 1984 car bombing that injured schoolchildren.
In fact, the specter of Abdallah’s liberation triggered exactly the kind of political and media storm that shaped his trial nearly four decades ago. The only difference was that, this time, it was haunted by the memory of over a decade of Islamist violence and the subsequent rise of anti-Arab sentiment across France, which has heavily contributed to the successes of the far-right National Rally (RN) party. The RN currently holds 25% of seats in the National Assembly.
In the shadow of the 2015 attacks, any nuance around political violence is flattened. No matter how old or ideologically framed, the violence of the 1980s, because it was committed by an Arab man, has become indistinguishable from recent Islamist violence — which, lest we forget, is not the only threat currently plaguing the country. After a string of anti-Muslim murders earlier this year, French investigators have, in a first, opened a terrorism investigation into the racially motivated murder of a Tunisian barber by an RN supporter.
At the news of Abdallah’s release, RN President Jordan Bardella denounced the “far-left’s … noisy celebrations over the imminent release of a terrorist who never expressed a shred of remorse.” (Time and time again, Abdallah’s lawyers have had to reiterate that, unlike in the U.S., remorse has no part in the French legal equation.)
President Emmanuel Macron’s hard-right interior minister, Bruno Retailleau, quickly joined in on the “Abdallah affair.” In a post on X, presumably pandering to the anti-Arab prejudice prevalent among his electorate, Retailleau willfully omitted Abdallah’s Christian name, under which he’s been known for four decades, writing that “LFI elected officials who rejoice at the release of terrorist Ibrahim Abdallah are reaching a new level of indignity.”
Attacks against the French judicial system soon followed. “LFI has thus obtained from its lackey magistrates the release of the terrorist scumbag,” wrote the far-right French pundit Jean Messiha. The Egyptian-born former politician, who supported the nationalist Eric Zemmour’s last presidential campaign, then compared Abdallah to Salah Abdeslam, the only surviving member of the unit that carried out the 2015 attacks in Paris, lamenting that the death penalty had not been maintained.
Headlines, too, have been split along those lines, with Abdallah described variously as a “political prisoner,” a “Lebanese fighter,” a “Lebanese militant,” a “pro-Palestine activist” or a “terrorist,” depending on each publication’s leanings. Most fall in the middle, and a majority still link him, in one way or another, to the 1985-86 attacks in which he took no part and for which he was never tried.
On CNews (France’s equivalent of Fox News), commentators replayed the 1986 footage of the rue de Rennes attack, which occurred two years after Abdallah’s imprisonment, along with a video of his brothers.
Last Thursday, an X post from French media outlet 20 Minutes describing Abdallah as a “political prisoner” was deleted minutes after publication. So were the posts of not one but two French-Israeli journalists who called for Abdallah to be murdered via explosive pager upon his return to Lebanon.
“Forty years is a long time, but you don’t feel it when there’s a dynamic of struggle,” Abdallah told AFP from his cell last Thursday. “I have a calendar on my computer where I follow what’s happening day by day: Deceased comrades are in brown, orange is for visits, green is for birthdays. Brown takes up a lot of space.”
Now white-haired and slightly hunched, Abdallah insists that he will remain an activist after his release to Lebanon — “in different conditions,” and in a country radically changed by 40 years of conflict.
Abdallah is not stepping into anonymity upon landing in Beirut. Lebanese supporters promised a hero’s welcome, though they worried that he could be targeted. “We fear that his enemies might attack him upon his release from prison,” Abdallah’s lawyer in Lebanon, Fidaa Abd al-Fatah, told Franceinfo. “We are asking the Lebanese state to protect him like any other citizen because we are afraid he might be assassinated.”
His return also leaves a question mark over France, where debates about justice, memory and political violence are far from settled, and where the Abdallah saga remains a reminder of the divisions that still run deep in French society.
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