Paris: Once among the world's most feared masterminds of terror, the man known as Carlos the Jackal is now a greying convict who has been behind bars for 17 years. Today, he goes on trial for four deadly attacks that occurred nearly three decades ago, and the verdict could determine his chances of ever being freed.
Defiant ahead of the proceedings before a special anti-terrorism court — expected to last six weeks — the 62-year-old whose real name is Ilich Ramirez Sanchez told a French radio in a clandestine interview that he has "a character adapted to this kind of combat".
"I'm still in a combative state of mind," he said. Still, Ramirez, suffering from Type 2 diabetes and apparently mellowing, misses the family life he said he sacrificed in his years globe-hopping as a freelance terrorist through Middle East and European capitals, then on the run and finally imprisoned in France in 1994.
He keeps dreaming that one day he can leave his French captors for his home country, Venezuela, whose president, Hugo Chavez, once praised him as a "revolutionary fighter" — and whose embassy in Paris reportedly supplied him until recently with Havana cigars.
Honeymoon dream
"The first thing I'll do if I get out by the grace of God… I'll start with my honeymoon. It's more than a decade late," he said in a telephone interview last month with Europe 1 radio.
His 2001 prison marriage in an Islamic ceremony with one of his lawyers, Isabelle Coutant-Peyre — his third wife — is classic Carlos, just like the unauthorised interview ahead of his trial that landed him in solitary confinement — ended only by a 10-day hunger strike.
Life's little basics are wanting, he said. "I can't shave, I can't cut my nails," he complained.
Most of the world remembers another Carlos the Jackal, commanding and boastful, slipping from country to country at will and defying Western secret services. For the revolutionary movements that thrived in the 1970s, he became a living legend.
Spirited to Paris
Ramirez is the chief suspect in the 1975 seizure of Opec oil ministers, and received a heroic welcome when he landed with his hostages in Algeria, and in the 1976 Palestinian hijacking of a French jetliner to Entebbe, Uganda, which ended with an Israeli commando raid.
Safe havens grew scarce and allies turned dubious once the world was upended by the fall of communism in 1989. French secret agents snatched him from his refuge in Khartoum, Sudan, on August 14, 1994, and spirited him to Paris in a sack.
The Carlos of then was convicted of killing at close range two unarmed French investigators and an alleged Lebanese informant, a friend he feared was a turncoat.
Now, a new moment of truth awaits Ramirez, this time in a special court devoted to terrorism cases overseen by a panel of anonymous magistrates. He is charged in connection with four bombings in France, in 1982 and 1983, that killed 11 people and injured 140.
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