A new trial has opened against the formidable Carlos “El Chacal”: the provocative sentence facing the judge

Venezuelan Ilich Ramirez Sánchez, known as Carlos “The Jackal”, appeared this Wednesday before the court which must fix the sentence of his responsibility in a Bombing of a shopping arcade in Paris in 1974 which left two dead.

This new trial, ordered in November 2019 by the Court of Cassation, will last until Friday and will only study the length of the sentence, since justice has already firmly established his guilt. The previously imposed sentence was life imprisonment.

The 71-year-old accused, in prison at France since his capture in 1994 to Sudan, entered the quay shortly before 9.45 a.m. smiling, wearing a dark jacket and blue shirt, and with the mask under his nose. “I have been on forced vacation for 27 and a half yearsHe told the presiding judge when he urged him to identify himself. In his first words, he denounced the search of his clothes, assuring that in 27 years they had never found anything on him.

Carlos “The Jackal” was sentenced in March 2017 to life imprisonment, a sentence upheld on appeal a year later, for throwing a grenade into the gallery Publicis Pharmacy of Paris in 1974, killing two and injuring 34.

The Court of Cassation partially overturned the second conviction, which found the Venezuelan guilty of murders and attempted murder for “explosive power effect“And to transport”an explosive device without a legitimate reason”.

This jurisdiction, the highest judicial hierarchy of France, considered that the transport of the grenade was “a preliminary operation necessary for the commission of other crimes“And felt that Carlos he had been convicted twice for the same act.

This figure of the armed struggle “anti-imperialist“From the years 1970-1980 she was already sentenced twice to life imprisonment for a triple murder in 1975 in Paris and four bombings in France in 1982 and 1983 (11 dead and 191 injured).

The terrorist attack

The attack on Publicis Pharmacy took place on September 15, 1974 in Paris. At around 5:10 p.m., a grenade from an upstairs restaurant exploded on the ground floor of the then popular shopping arcade.

For the prosecution, the attack was aimed at facilitating the release of a Japanese detained in Orly, member of Japanese Red Army, a far-left Japanese armed group that simultaneously kidnapped hostages at the French embassy in The Hague. This movement was close to a branch of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) of which Carlos had become one of his weapons Europe.

Lack of DNA and confession, the Venezuelan was found guilty of a series of elements of the prosecution, including the testimony of a former comrade in arms repented, Hans Joachim Klein.

According to the investigation, the pomegranate used in Pharmacy comes from the same lot stolen from a military base in Germany that some have found in the house of the lover of Carlos and that those abandoned in the hostage-taking in The Hague. Carlos himself claimed responsibility for this action in an interview at the end of 1979 with El-Watan Al-Arabi magazine. The accused denied giving such an interview.

In its appeal judgment, in March 2018, “The Jackal“He recounted his years of flight and political struggle, assuring that violence had been” imposed “on him, but he avoided acknowledging the crimes for which he was convicted.

“The Jackal”

Ilich Ramirez Sánchez was born on October 12, 1949 in Caracas. His father was a Marxist business lawyer who named his two other sons Lenin and Vladimir. At 15, he joined the Venezuelan Communist Party, then underground, and later he will study at Moscow, at University Patrice Lumumba.

In early 1971 and after having spent a training camp at Jordan attached to Palestine Liberation Front (PFLP) led by Georges habache. Be in the PFLP would adopt his nom de guerre, ‘Carlos‘, to whom the British newspaper The Guardian added the nickname ‘The Jackal’.

The French services responsible for investigating activities in France of PFLP they discover Carlos on June 27, 1975, when the apartment of a Venezuelan was searched by indications of a Lebanese informantIn su huida, Carlos he kills two Parisian policemen and the Lebanese who betrayed him.

During these years he had been involved in a multitude of actions, including a grenade attack in the gallery Publicis Pharmacy from Paris in September 1974, killing two and injuring 34.

At the same time, he participated in a hostage-taking at the French embassy in The Hague, and later in a failed missile attack on the Paris airport of Orly (January 1975) or the supervision of the spectacular kidnapping of ministers of OPEC to A (December 1975).

Between 1982 and 1983, Carlos “the Jackal” will be at the origin of four other bombings in France, which left 11 dead and 191 injured: in a train between Paris and Toulouse, in the street Marbeuf to Paris, at the station Marseilles and on a high-speed train between Marseilles and Paris.

After stays in several Arab countries or Eastern Europe under the communist regime, Carlos settles in Damascus in 1983. Eleven years later, in August 1994, French secret agents captured him in Sudan and they take it for France.

The trials follow one another. In December 1997, he was sentenced to life imprisonment for the triple homicide during his escape in June 1975.

In December 2011, he received another life sentence for the attacks of 1982-1983 and, in March 2018, he was again given a life sentence for the attack on the store. Publicis Pharmacy 1974.

But in November 2019, the Court of Cassation he partially quashed the latter conviction and ordered a new trial to determine the length of the sentence, while upholding the guilty verdict on the murders and attempted assassinations.

This process will take place from September 22 to 24 in Paris.

(With information from AFP and international agencies) .-

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