Once one of the world’s most wanted and elusive criminals, Carlos the Jackal is now on trial, accused of instigating four attacks in 1982 and 1983 that killed 11 people and injured more than 140 others.
The 62-year-old Venezuelan, whose real name is Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, had a criminal career spanning the 70s and 80s as a self-described “professional revolutionary.”
Ramirez is already serving a life sentence in France, handed down for murdering two French agents and an alleged informer in 1975.
He was also the chief suspect in the 1975 hostage-taking of OPEC oil ministers in Vienna that left three people dead.
The three were killed as Ramirez allegedly led a group of terrorists in to the meeting firing machine guns. They seized 70 hostages.
The group demanded a statement be read over the radio in the Middle East. The Austrian government allowed the terrorists to take 11 hostages out of the building, and they were eventually released in Algeria.
The attack came during what French investigators consider to be Ramirez’s first heyday – eight attacks over two years starting in December 1973.
Ramirez was born to a millionaire Marxist lawyer in Venezuela in 1949. His family moved to London in the mid-1960s.
He attended the Patrice Lumumba University in Moscow, notorious as a recruiting hub for foreign communists to the Soviet Union.
It wasn’t long until Ramirez began planning and executing attacks in Europe, acting in the name of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and far-left European terror groups.
Ramirez is believed to have been involved in the murder of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics.
He is charged with instigating four attacks in 1982 and 1983 that killed 11 people and injured more than 140 others.
French prosecutors claim two attacks in 1982 were carried out to pressure the French government to free girlfriend Magdalena Kopp – with whom he later married and had a daughter – and comrade Bruno Breguet.
Five people were killed in the March 1982 bombing of a Toulouse-Paris train mere days after a deadline for the release of Kopp and Breguet sent in a letter to France’s Embassy in the Netherlands. The letter allegedly contained two fingerprints of Ramirez.
Ramirez was living under an alias in Khartoum, Sudan in 1994, when he was captured by French operatives and brought back to Paris.
He was convicted and sentenced to life in prison three years later.
With files from the Canadian Press
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