Carlos the Jackal faces new trial
Killer for court over fatal grenade attack
PARIS // Carlos the Jackal, the perpetrator of headline- grabbing attacks in the 1970s and early 1980s, is due to go on trial in France today for the deadly bombing of a Paris shop more than 40 years ago.
With France now on high alert for attacks by extremists, the trial in Paris will evoke an era when Europe was repeatedly targeted by ruthless groups sympathetic to the Palestinian cause.
Venezuela-born Ilyich Ramirez Sanchez, 67, was nicknamed Carlos the Jackal by the media when he was one of the world’s most wanted terrorist suspects. He describes himself as a “professional revolutionary”.
The nickname came from a fictional assassin in the 1971 Frederick Forsyth novel, The Day of the Jackal , which was turned into a popular film.
Arrested in the Sudanese capital Khartoum in 1994 by elite French police, Carlos is already serving a life sentence for murdering two police officers in Paris in 1975 and a Lebanese revolutionary.
He was also found guilty of four bombings in Paris and Marseille in 1982 and 1983, some targeting trains, which killed a total of 11 people and injured nearly 150.
Carlos’s latest trial is over an attack on the Drugstore Publicis, a busy shop once located in SaintGermain-des-Pres in Paris. On September 15, 1974, a grenade was thrown into the entrance of the shop, killing two men and injuring 34.
Georges Holleaux, a lawyer representing the two widows of the men who were killed and 16 other people affected, said they relished the chance to finally see Carlos in court. “The victims have been waiting so long for Carlos to be judged and convicted. Their wounds have never healed,” he said.
Carlos denies the charges against him, which include “murders carried out with a terrorist organisation”. His lawyer, Isabelle Coutant-Peyre, called the trial a waste of time and money. “What exactly is the point of having a trial so long after the events?” she said.
In 1979, Al Watan Al Arabi magazine published an interview with Carlos in which he supposedly admitted he had thrown the grenade. He has since denied giving the interview.
The prosecution claims the attack was linked to a hostage- taking at the French embassy in the Dutch capital The Hague that had begun two days earlier, on September 13, 1974. The Japanese Red Army, a communist militant group which had close ties to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine in which Carlos was the head of “special operations”, was demanding the release of one of its members who had been arrested at Paris Orly airport two months earlier. The prosecution claims Carlos orchestrated the hostage- taking in The Hague and carried out the Paris attack to force the French government to give in to the Japanese group’s demands.
He achieved his aim – the Japanese suspect was released and travelled to Yemen with other members of the hostage-taking team.
The case against Carlos is also based on witness testimony from his former brothers in arms.