Widow of Slain U.S. Diplomat Weeps at Trial of Accused Arab

Sharon Ray, the 47-year-old widow of slain U.S. military attache Charles R. Ray, broke down and wept Tuesday at the terrorist trial of Georges Ibrahim Abdallah, the self-styled “Arab combatant” charged with complicity in the murder of her husband.

“This assassination,” she testified, “did not change one bit of United States policy. It just changed the life of my family, and they still suffer.”

With these words she was trying to refute a statement made by Abdallah on Monday at the opening of the trial that the slaying of her husband and an Israeli diplomat in 1982 were justifiable acts of war against imperialism. The 35-year-old Abdallah denied any involvement in the murders, even while praising them.

Sharon Ray’s words, spoken in a quavering voice, were not heard by the heavily bearded Lebanese Christian: On Monday, he asked guards to take him from the courtroom after he made his opening statement. Under French law, a defendant may refuse to attend a trial so long as a lawyer is present to defend him.

“I am upset,” the colonel’s widow said Tuesday, “because I stand here in front of a case that has a gun that killed my husband.”

Czech-Made Pistol

Objects submitted as evidence in a French criminal trial are kept in a transparent case in the courtroom. Earlier Tuesday, when the gun, a Czech-made pistol, was taken from the case and shown to the seven judges trying the case, she began to sob and then left the courtroom. She returned to make her statement.

When she was asked to describe her employment, she replied: “I was a housewife. Now I’m a mother.” She said that the death of her husband had been extremely difficult for their children--a daughter, now 22, and a son, now 20--to accept.

“My husband always taught them to respect life and property,” she said. “To have someone sneak up behind him and shoot him in the head--it’s absolutely impossible to explain it to my children. They don’t think like that. We don’t think like that. . . .

“When I told them, my son just fell over, and my daughter just looked at me. They did not understand. Because I told them very fast. I told them, ‘Your father has been shot in the head.’ It’s a cowardly way. No one deserves to be executed in this way.”

Abdallah is charged with complicity in the 1982 killing of Ray in Paris, the 1982 killing of Israeli diplomat Yacov Barsimantov and the attempted killing in 1984 of U.S. Consul Robert O. Homme in Strasbourg.