US Pressures France Not to Release George Abdullah

The United States objected on Friday to a French court’s planned release of the Lebanese pro-Palestinian political prisoner inside the “Israeli” jails George Abdullah.

The US claimed that “Abdullah may still be a threat a quarter century after he was convicted of killing an American and an “Israeli” diplomat.”
A French appeals court on Thursday granted conditional release to George Ibrahim Abdullah, imprisoned since 1984 and still in custody for now, contingent on his being deported to Lebanon.

“We don’t think he should be released and we are continuing our consultations with the French government about it,” State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland told reporters. “We have serious concerns that he could return to the battlefield.”
The former head of the Lebanese Armed Revolutionary Brigade, Abdullah, 61, was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1987. A lower court granted Abdullah parole in November – prompting a rebuke from the US ambassador to France, who said he deserved life imprisonment – and the prosecutors appealed.

In 1987, he was condemned to life in prison for complicity in the assassinations, even though the court was not able to present concrete evidence against him. A former director of the French intelligence agency, Yves Bonnet, later said that Abdullah was the victim of “an illegal intelligence conspiracy.”

Over the years, Abdullah became a miscarriages of justice for resistance. He became eligible for parole after 18 years in prison, but each of his seven applications for release were turned down since 1999, a major breach of French legal procedures and the European Convention on Human Rights.