Nicolas Cinquini

a victory for justice

The Tribunal d’application des peines [sentencing court] has agreed today on parole on December 6 for Lebanese communist militant Georges Abdallah, who is in jail for 40 years. French prosecutors are under control of the executive branch and the Parquet national antiterroriste [National Anti-Terrorism Prosecutor’s Office, PNAT] is appealing that decision.

Now 73 years old, Abdallah was arrested in France in 1984 and after pretrial detention, convicted in 1987 for complicity in two murders. Colonel Charles Ray, US military attaché and CIA intelligence officer, was shot in Paris on January 18, 1982. Second secretary of Israel’s embassy and Mossad intelligence officer, Yacov Barsimantov was shot in Paris on March 31, 1982. The intelligence functions of the two victims are confirmed nowadays by Yves Bonnet, head between 1982 and 1985 of the Direction de la surveillance du territoire [Territorial Surveillance Directorate, French counter-intelligence agency, DST]. The Fractions armées révolutionnaires libanaises [Lebanese Revolutionary Armed Fractions, FARL] took credit for the two murders.

A matter of course : Abdallah would have not been sentenced to life imprisonment without formal intervention of the US government. The investigators found no evidence of its membership in the FARL or involvement in the murders. That was rather a matter of intelligence. And according to several former French professionals, the intelligence was wrong. The US joined a civil action to criminal proceedings and through diplomatic and intelligence channels, it demanded that the defendant was sentenced to life imprisonment

Under French law, Abdallah could have been granted parole since 1999. But obviously, like it also appeared in WikiLeaks,

• here
  April 27, 2007, from US embassy to CIA, … and Secretary of State
• and here
  January 11, 2013, from Hillary Clinton to her executive assistant, Jennifer Davis

the US authorities, including Hillary Clinton, were continuing to lobby their French lackeys against his parole.