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Carlos Jackal

November 7, 2011 by · Comments Off on Carlos Jackal 

Carlos Jackal, Urban guerrilla ‘Carlos the Jackal’ smiled and flashed a clenched fist salute on Monday when he went on trial for deadly Paris bomb attacks he is accused of mounting at the height of his “anti-imperialist campaign” in the 1970s and 1980s.

“I am a revolutionary by profession,” Ilich Ramirez Sanchez declared to a special t*rror*sm court of judges, his bluster clearly undiminished by two decades served in French prisons since his 1994 capture in Khartoum by French special forces.

Ramirez is now 62, sports a grey beard and carries a paunch; but over some 30 years, he was the face of militant Marxist struggle, his taste for Havana cigars, Che Guevara-style berets, alcohol and women only adding to his revolutionary allure.

For his small coterie of admirers, some of whom were in court on Monday, he was a romantic anti-imperialist fighter, for others a cold-blooded killer.

Ramirez, dressed in a casual blue jacket and blue sweater, sat in a hardened glass box, guarded by three police officers, occasionally dangling an arm casually through an opening as he watched proceedings.

He faces a second term of life in prison if convicted for four bombings in 1982 and 1983 that killed 11 people and wounded nearly 200. He was sentenced to life in 1997 by a French court for killing two police officers and an informant.

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