A Paris appeals court on Thursday ordered the release of Georges Ibrahim Abdallah, one of France’s longest-serving prisoners, ending nearly four decades behind bars. The 74-year-old Lebanese national is to be freed on 25 July, the ruling said, after judges found the length of his incarceration “disproportionate” and concluded he no longer poses a significant public danger. Abdallah, a former leader of the Lebanese Armed Revolutionary Factions, received a life sentence in 1987 for complicity in the 1982 murders of U.S. military attaché Charles Robert Ray and Israeli diplomat Yacov Barsimentov in Paris, as well as the 1984 attempted assassination of U.S. Consul Robert Homme in Strasbourg. Detained since 1984 and eligible for parole since 1999, he has repeatedly maintained that his actions were part of the Palestinian struggle. The court made his conditional release contingent on his immediate departure from French territory—he is expected to be deported to Lebanon—and noted that €16,000 has been set aside for victims’ families. The U.S. government, a civil party to the case, and French anti-terror prosecutors have consistently opposed his release; they may seek review by the Court of Cassation, but any appeal would not delay his liberation.