A French appeals court
on Thursday granted conditional release to George Ibrahim Abdallah, who was imprisoned
since 1984 and is currently in custody at the moment, contingent on his being deported to
Lebanon, a step in the hands of the French Foreign Ministry.
“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.”
As the former head of the Lebanese Armed Revolutionary Brigade, Abdallah, 61, was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1987 for his role in the 1982 murders in Paris of US military attache Lt. Col. Charles Robert Ray and Israeli diplomat Yaacov Bar-Simantov, and the attempted murder of US Consul General Robert Homme in Strasbourg in 1984.
Bar-Simantov’s killer,
a woman wearing a white beret, fled into the Paris Metro after shooting him in
the head in front of his wife and children at their apartment building. The
diplomat was the second secretary for political affairs at the embassy.
Abdallah shot Ray, an
assistant military attache, outside Ray’s apartment building the same year.
A lower court granted
Abdallah parole in November - prompting a rebuke from the US ambassador to
France, who said he deserved life imprisonment - and the prosecutors appealed.
In backing the
November decision, the appeals court rejected prosecution warnings that he was
still a threat. Abdallah, who made seven previous attempts to be released, won
conditional liberty in 2003, but that decision was struck down on appeal.