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| Europe |
| 'Carlos the Jackal' faces new trial for French bomb attacks |
| 2007-05-04 |
| PARIS (AFP) - The convicted Venezuelan terrorist known as Carlos the Jackal is to stand trial for a wave of 1980s bomb attacks in France that left 11 dead, legal officials said Friday. The Marxist-Leninist radical, who once boasted that his plots had killed more than 1,500 people, is already serving a life sentence in France for the 1975 murder of two French policemen and an alleged police informer. Top French anti-terror judge Jean-Louis Bruguiere has now ordered him to stand trial for "complicity in killings and destruction of property using explosive substances" in relation to four bombings in France in 1982 and 1983 that killed 11 and injured more than 100 people, officials said. The charge sheet against Carlos, whose real name is Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, says the attacks were part of a "private war" waged by Carlos against France to try to obtain the release of two members of his gang who were arrested as they prepared an attack on the Kuwaiti embassy in Paris. The charges relate to attacks on a train travelling from Paris to the southwestern city of Toulouse that left five dead; on the Paris office of the Arabic-language Al Watan magazine that killed one; on the Saint-Charles train station in the Mediterranean city of Marseille that killed two; and on a high-speed TGV train that killed three. The Paris-Toulouse train line was frequently used at the time by Jacques Chirac, France's outgoing rightwing president who was then mayor of Paris. According to Hungarian and East German archives cited in the case, Chirac was the target in the attack on that line. But attempting to assassinate Chirac is not one of the charges being laid against Carlos in this case, and he was not on the train when the bomb went off. Three other people, Christa Margot Frohlich, Ali Al Issawi and Johannes Weinrich, have also been ordered to stand trial in the case. Weinrich is currently serving a prison term in Germany. It was not immediately clear where the two others were. The trial is unlikely to start before next year. Carlos, 57, rose to infamy in 1975 when he took 11 ministers hostage from the powerful OPEC oil cartel. There's a pic of him at the link. He looks a lot older then 57. His commando group burst into the conference room where the OPEC ministers and their staff were meeting in Vienna, killing a Libyan delegate, an Austrian policeman and an Iraqi bodyguard. Saying he was acting for the "Arm of the Arab Revolution," a previously unknown group, Carlos demanded the broadcast of a text condemning Israel, the Palestine Liberation Organization, the oil monarchies of the Gulf and then Egyptian president Anwar Sadat. The siege at OPEC headquarters went on until the following morning, when Carlos's team took a DC-9 plane supplied by Austrian authorities to fly towards Algiers with 40 hostages. After two decades on the run, Carlos was finally captured in Khartoum in 1994 by French secret service agents acting with the help of the Sudanese government. He is serving his life sentence in Clairvaux prison in eastern France. |
| Posted by:tu3031 |
| #3 He's getting old and feeble (I hope), so it's time to put him on trial! Compare with, say, McVeigh, who is now in Hell. |
| Posted by: Jackal (no relation) 2007-05-04 15:27 |
| #2 Damn, comment was purged because it contained the P word. Ok, so again, IIUC, he is a muslim convert, though while he was living in karthoum he enjoyed a sleazy lifestyle (one vid has him dancing, all obese and drunk, in a nightclub with a creature of uncertain morality). My memory is faulty, because my mind is rotten by Pr0n (see, with this spelling, it will be ok, I bet), but IIRC, his capture was a rather shoddy affair, he was shangaied by french agents while asleep for a liposuction, and there was credible evidence at the time that he was exchanged for aerial recon imagery of rebel forces in south sudan. Also, while in jail, in addition to marrying his far-left lawyer (whoi struck me as crazy and hateful in a tv debate quite a few years ago), he wrote a book called "revolutionary islam", in which he identifies the Master Religion™ as the force that will finally annihilate the western world order. For this kind of unholy convergence, again I refer to this great article. |
| Posted by: anonymous5089 2007-05-04 13:37 |
| #1 Wow. A "blast" from the past. |
| Posted by: JohnQC 2007-05-04 13:21 |