After more than 40 years of detention, a French court ordered the release of Georges Ibrahim Abdallah on Thursday morning, July 17. The Paris Court of Appeal, after a closed-door hearing, granted Abdallah a conditional release and ordered that he be deported to Lebanon on July 25.

The 74-year-old veteran activist of the Lebanese Armed Revolutionary Factions (LARF) group will have one week to clear out his cell in the southern French prison where he has been detained for decades, in which letters of support, flags, posters of Che Guevara, books and newspapers have accumulated over the years. He will be transported by military aircraft to Paris, then held in a detention center before boarding a flight to Beirut, where he will be handed over to the Lebanese authorities. He will then be able to spend the rest of his life in his home village of Kobayat, in northern Lebanon.

Abdallah was arrested in 1984 and sentenced to life imprisonment in 1987 for complicity in the terrorist assassinations of Charles R. Ray, a US assistant military attaché, and Yacov Barsimantov, second secretary at the Israeli embassy, who were both killed by the LARF in Paris in 1982. Abdallah has always proclaimed his innocence regarding these two attacks. However, he has always claimed political responsibility for them, describing them as "acts of resistance" against "Israeli and American oppression."

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