TERRORISTS, though you may not want to consider them normal human beings and may feel appalled by their methods, usually have their causes that they firmly believe in and are willing to give their lives for.
But Illich Ramirez Sanchez had no apparent reasons to turn himself into a killer. Born in 1949 in the Venezuelan city of Michelena in a well-to-do family, he successfully completed his studies in high standard educational institutions, first in his hometown then in Havana, London, Paris and Moscow where he excelled in political science and economics in addition to mastering national languages.
Nevertheless, Sanchez rejected all offers to launch himself into a successful career and live an upper class life in the city of his choice —New York, Paris or London to start with. He apparently had no dreams — unless you consider throwing bombs one.
In 1970, he travelled to Iraq in order to join an army training camp along the Syrian border. Soon enough he adopted a single name, Carlos, and started participating in military operations as a volunteer.
In 1973, he would return to London to make a failed attempt to kill an Israeli businessman. His other rapidly following exploits would include bomb attacks on a bank and on the offices of three newspapers whose coverage of the Middle East conflict he apparently did not approve of.
By now known in the media as ‘Jackal’, he extended his mission to Paris where has was accused of launching a bomb attack at the Orly airport killing a number of people.
In 1975, heavily armed, he interrupted an Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (Opec) conference in Vienna, taking 42 hostages with him on a special flight to Algiers. The hostages would later be released by the Algerian government.
Jackal further boastfully claimed responsibility for a number of other terrorist attacks in many European countries. True or not, they added to his cherished image of a passionate bomb thrower. Finally, in 1994 he would be arrested in Sudan and transferred to Paris where he faced an assortment of criminal accusations.
Twice condemned on terrorism charges and following more than two decades in prison, Illich Ramirez Sanches, or Carlos (or Jackal, if you so prefer) faced the judges in Paris once again on the accusation of a 1974 bomb attack on a pharmacy in which two people were killed and 34 injured.
He was already undergoing two parallel solitary life sentences in prison for the murders of three people and for bomb attacks on trains near Marseilles in 1982 and 1983 in which 11 people were killed and 150 injured.
But even horror stories sometimes have a romantic side. Readers will be amused to learn that the Jackal’s French lawyer Isabelle Coutant-Peyre was so charmed by her client’s persona that she could not help falling in love with him. The two were married in jail in 2001.
As his trial opened last week, standing before the judges the 68-year-old Illich Ramirez Sanches carefully brushed back his now greying hair, raised his fist and shouted: “It could have been me who carried out those attacks or maybe it was someone else. You have no proof. Here I am and my war is far from over!”
His wife-lawyer later told the journalists: “There is no sense in bringing to the court an accusation against a man for a crime committed more than 40 years ago.”
To which Francis Szpiner, the lawyer for the injured survivors, replied that the trial was necessary in order to prove that terrorists will always be pursued and that the culture of impunity for them was over.
On March 28, the Paris High Court pronounced its verdict. Carlos was given his third life sentence on the charge of terrorism.
The writer is a journalist based in Paris
Published in Dawn, April 2nd, 2017
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