PARIS – Once the world’s most-wanted fugitive, the political extremist known as Carlos the Jackal is appearing a French court for a deadly 1974 attack against a Paris shopping arcade, a trial that victims’ families have been awaiting for decades.
The Venezuelan-born Ilich Ramirez Sanchez is accused of throwing a hand grenade from a mezzanine restaurant onto a shopping area in the French capital’s latin Quarter. Two people were killed and 34 injured at the trendy Drugstore Publicis.
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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 organizing in the country on behalf of the Palestinian cause in the 1970s and ’80s.
If convicted of first-degree murders in the trial beginning Monday, he could get a third life sentence. It’s probably the last case concerning his past to come to trial.
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At the time of the attack, Ramirez Sanchez was 24 years old and already had joined the organization Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, but hadn’t yet achieved worldwide notoriety.
Carlos has pleaded innocent and denied involvement in the case.
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.
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