‘Jackal’ Defiantly Faces His Accusers Paris Trial Begins For Terrorist Of Paisley Foulard, Bloody Fame
The international terrorist known as Carlos, gray-haired but proudly boasting of being “a professional revolutionary in the old Leninist tradition,” went on trial here Friday on charges of killing two French security officials and a Lebanese informant 22 years ago.
Carlos, a 48-year-old Venezuelan named Ilich Ramirez Sanchez who enlisted in the Palestinian cause after a Marxist upbringing and an education in Moscow, has spent more than three years in French jails and is wanted by at least four other countries for kidnappings, killings and bombings in the 1970s and 1980s.
He was convicted in absentia by a French court in 1992 and sentenced to life in prison in the same 1975 case for which he is now being retried.
Carlos became entitled to a new trial after French agents tracked him down to a hideout in Khartoum, the capital of the Sudan, in the summer of 1994 and persuaded authorities there to let them take him to France, just after he had undergone a minor operation.
They zipped him up in a bag and unceremoniously bundled him off to prison in Paris, one of the many things he complained about Friday in rapid, Spanish-accented French while taking his defense largely into his own hands to argue to his three judges and nine lay jurors that he should not be tried because he had been illegally imprisoned.
Carlos looked well fed and cocky when guards marched him into the dock of a courtroom sealed off by 70 armed policemen in the Palais de Justice, next to the medieval Sainte-Chapelle on the Ile de la Cite, at 1:30 p.m. Friday.
Dressed in a beige smock that could not hide a paunch, and sporting a light open-collared shirt with a paisley foulard, Carlos bantered with the presiding judge, Yves Corneloup, and argued that a terrorist victims’ group named SOS-Attentats should not be allowed to take part in the proceedings because he said it was an agency of Zionist and American imperialism.
The court, which barred cameras, did not rule immediately on either issue. The trial will resume Monday.
“I have been a political militant in the Palestinian cause since 1970,” he said in one of many monologues Corneloup made no attempt to stop, urging him only to speak more slowly so that he could be better understood.
“Our enemy is the enemy of humanity, of the Palestinian people and of France - American imperialism in league with the Zionist state,” Carlos said.
Sought for years for a string of bombings, assassinations and attacks that included the kidnapping of 11 OPEC oil ministers in Vienna in 1975, Carlos became known as “the Jackal.” A wanted poster showing his wide, impassive face in dark glasses over an open-collar shirt became an emblem of defiance for left-wing terrorist movements around the globe.
The Soviet Union had expelled him as a troublemaker in 1970 when he and one of his brothers, Lenin - his parents, admirers of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, named another brother Vladimir - were studying at the Patrice Lumumba University in Moscow.
But the Communist secret police of East Germany, Hungary, and Romania gave him shelter into the mid1980s, keeping a wary eye on his activities while he was on their soil and not worrying much about his depredations in other places.
The trial Friday, the first of several he faces here for crimes he is suspected of committing on French soil, concerns the killing on June 27, 1975, of two unarmed French internal security agents - Raymond Dous and Jean Donatini - and Michel Moukharbal, a Lebanese suspect the police were investigating for attacks against the Israeli airline El Al at Orly Airport in Paris.
The French anti-terrorist magistrate who developed this case, Judge Jean-Louis Bruguiere, is pursuing three more investigations against him, according to the authorities.