Born in 1951 into a Christian family in northern Lebanon, in the late 1970s Abdallah helped set up the Lebanese Armed Revolutionary Factions (LARF) \u2013 a small Marxist group dedicated to fighting Israel and its closest ally, the United States.<\/p>\n
At the time Lebanon was embroiled in a civil war. In 1978 and again in 1982 Israel invaded south Lebanon to combat Palestinian fighters based there.<\/p>\n
Abdallah’s group decided to hit Israeli and US targets in Europe, and carried out five attacks in France. In 1982 its members shot and killed US diplomat Charles Ray in Strasbourg, and Israeli diplomat Yakov Barsimantov in Paris. In addition a car bomb blamed on LARF killed two French bomb-disposal experts.<\/p>\n
Abdallah was arrested in Lyon in 1984. Tailed by French intelligence officers, he thought he was being followed by Israeli assassins and gave himself in at a police station. Initially he was charged only with having false passports and criminal association.<\/p>\n
A short time later a French citizen was kidnapped in northern Lebanon, and the French secret service entered a negotiation via Algeria to engineer an exchange.<\/p>\n
The French citizen was freed, but just before Abdallah was to be released police in Paris found a cache of weapons at his flat, including the gun used to kill the diplomats. This made his liberation impossible.<\/p>\n
Two years later in the run up to his trial, Paris was hit by a spate of terrorist attacks which killed 13 people. These were blamed by politicians and the media on allies of Abdallah trying to pressurise France into freeing him. Later it was established that in fact they were the work of the Lebanese Shia group Hezbollah, under instructions from Iran.<\/p>\n
In the trial, Abdallah denied involvement in the murders but defended their legitimacy. He was given a life sentence.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Born in 1951 into a Christian family in northern Lebanon, in the late 1970s Abdallah helped set up…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":289482,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5309],"tags":[2000,299,36],"class_list":{"0":"post-289481","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-france","8":"tag-eu","9":"tag-europe","10":"tag-france"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114911584109749999","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/289481","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=289481"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/289481\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/289482"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=289481"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=289481"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=289481"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}