Palestinian activist Mariam Abou Daqqa was arrested late Wednesday evening in Paris, a few hours after the validation of her expulsion by the Council of State, AFP learned from police sources and her lawyer.
The activist was arrested in the 13th arrondissement and placed under the regime of “administrative restraint”, her lawyer, Julie Gonidec, told AFP. Mariam Abou Daqqa will now be placed under house arrest or placed in a detention center, the lawyer said. “And we will contest,” she added.
According to Me Gonidec, Mariam Abou Daqqa had a “return ticket” reserved for November 11 to go to Egypt. She then had to “return to her home and her family in Gaza”, added the New Anti-Capitalist Party (NPA) in a press release, denouncing “relentlessness” from the French state. Around fifty people gathered this Thursday evening near the Police Prefecture in Paris to demand the release of Mariam Abou Daqqa, also denouncing the conditions of her arrest, shortly after her participation in a debate evening in a Parisian cinema.
Unceremonious arrest
According to activists present with her, police officers without distinctive signs arrested her bluntly as she returned to the home where she was staying. “There were four or five of them on Mariam. They lifted her like a sack of potatoes, took her by the wrists and feet and threw her in the back of a car,” said one of these activists, Sarah Katz, saying she had been jostled in the operation.
“It was extremely violent, I thought it was an attack. We were extremely worried,” assured Marie-France Cohen Solal, of the France Palestine Solidarity Association (AFPS), denouncing “a complete disrespect of the human person that Mariam Abou Daqqa is.”
A complaint for violence in meetings by persons holding public authority was filed at the 13th arrondissement police station, they specified. “Her arrest cannot be legitimized by any reason linked to public order and the violence shown by the police against this 72-year-old woman during her arrest is unacceptable,” denounced the communist group in a statement. Assembly.
Conferences on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict
The Council of State gave the green light on Wednesday to the expulsion of the activist from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), a radical left-wing organization described as “terrorist” by Israel and the European Union. The highest French administrative court overturned a decision of the Paris administrative court, which had suspended the expulsion order issued by the Ministry of the Interior against him.
Mariam Abou Daqqa, 72, had obtained a 50-day visa for France at the beginning of August at the French consulate in Jerusalem, where she was to participate in various conferences on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Arriving in September, she gave two conferences despite the ban on them and demonstrated for the release of PFLP activist Georges Ibrahim Abdallah, sentenced to life imprisonment in 1987 for the assassination of American and Israeli diplomats.