Jackal in new terror trial
Jailed political extremist is accused of deadly grenade attack in Paris
THE political extremist known as Carlos The Jackal has appeared in a French court over a deadly 1974 attack at a Paris shopping arcade, a trial that victims’ families awaited for decades.
Venezuelan-born Ilich Ramirez Sanchez is accused of throwing a hand grenade from a mezzanine restaurant on to a shopping area in the French capital’s Latin Quarter.
Two people were killed and 34 injured at the trendy Drugstore Publicis.
Known worldwide as Carlos, the 67-year-old is already serving a life sentence in France for a series of murders and attacks he has been convicted of perpetrating or organising in the country on behalf of the Palestinian cause or communist revolution in the 1970s and 1980s.
As the trial opened yesterday, Carlos denounced it as a “gross manipulation of justice” 42 years after the attack. He has denied involvement and pleaded innocent.
Asked to state his profession before the court, he called himself a “professional revolutionary” and said “I’m doing fine” in prison – after more than 20 years behind bars.
If convicted of first-degree murders in the trial, which is expected to last until March 31, he could get a third life sentence.
At the time of the 1974 attack, Ramirez Sanchez was 24 years old and had already joined the organisation Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, but had not yet achieved worldwide notoriety.
When police arrived at the scene of the attack, they found a devastated arcade with all the windows shattered, multiple bloodstains and a hole in the marble slab of the ground floor where the grenade fell.
The two men who died were hit by metal chips that perforated vital organs and caused internal bleeding, according to court documents.
His long-time lawyer and fiance Isabelle Coutant-Peyre claims none of the witnesses had described a man resembling her client, and that the whole case was trumped up.
The case took so long to go to trial because it was first dismissed for lack of evidence before being reopened when Carlos was arrested and imprisoned in France.
His lawyers repeatedly argued against holding a trial, arguing the attack was too long ago and that it will not make a difference for Carlos, already in prison for life.
“What need is there to hold this trial?” Ms Coutant-Peyre asked. “It’s a useless trial.”
The victims’ families, however, are relieved. “The civil parties demand justice,” said Georges Holleaux, lawyer for the widows of the two men killed in the attack and other civil parties to the case.
The case is being heard by a special court made up of professional judges and with no jurors, as is the custom with terrorism trials in France.
An Arab language news magazine in France, Al Watan Al Arabi, published a long interview with a man it identified as Ramirez Sanchez five years after the attack.
He allegedly claimed he had personally thrown the grenade into the restaurant, described the full details of the operation and explained why it was carried out.
Carlos later disputed he had given the interview.