Israel Matzav

French town makes murderer of US and Israeli diplomats an honorary citizen

A Paris suburb has granted honorary citizenship to the convicted murderer of an American and an Israeli diplomat. Georges Ibrahim Abdallah was complicit in the 1982 assassinations of Charles R. Ray, a US military attaché serving in Paris, and Yacov Bar-Simantov, a second counsellor at the Israeli embassy in Paris. He has been serving a life sentence since 1987.

Bar-Simantov’s killer, a woman wearing a white beret, fled into the Paris subway 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.

The motion passed by the council of Bagnolet, where the French Communist party enjoys a majority, does not mention his crimes. In it, he is referred to as a “one of Europe’s last remaining political prisoners” and “determined defender of the Palestinian just cause.”

His release is being prevented “primarily because of the intervention of the US government,” the motion read.

“To call for his liberation, the municipal council declares him an honorary citizen of Bagnolet,” it says.

Abdallah, who was first eligible for parole in 1999, has failed in eight bids to be released. A parole board approved his most recent bid in January, but the interior minister, Manuel Valls, refused to sign the order after complaints from the US embassy and lawmakers in the US Congress.

 I'd like to see the French dare to release this creep. I doubt he'd live very long.

Labels: France, French anti-Semitism, Palestinian terrorists, Paris

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 2:20 AM