PARIS, March 16 — Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, the self-styled revolutionary known as Carlos the Jackal, received a third life sentence on appeal yesterday over a deadly 1974 bombing in Paris.
Carlos refused to appear in court to hear the verdict, which upheld the sentence first handed down in March last year for a grenade attack which killed two people and injured dozens.
It may be one of the final trials for the man who became one of the world’s most notorious fugitives in the 1970s and 80s during his pro-Palestinian campaign of terror.
“I am a professional revolutionary; revolution is my job,” Carlos said at the beginning of his trial this month.
But Carlos has denied responsibility for the attack at the Publicis Drugstore at Saint-Germain-des-Pres, in the heart of Paris’s Left Bank, more than 40 years ago, when a grenade was thrown from the mezzanine restaurant into a crowded gallery below.
Judges determined that all evidence pointed to Carlos, even though no DNA or fingerprints were found after the bombing.
Little known at the time of the attack, Venezuelan-born Carlos shot to the front pages in 1975 when his commando group burst into a meeting of the OPEC oil cartel in Vienna, taking 11 people hostage. Three people were killed.
After 20 years on the run, he was finally arrested by French police in the Sudanese capital Khartoum in 1994, and has been imprisoned ever since.
He was given a life sentence for the 1975 murders of two policemen in the French capital, as well as that of a former comrade who betrayed him.
He was later found guilty of four bombings in Paris and Marseille in 1982 and 1983, some targeting trains, which killed a total of 11 people and injured nearly 150. — AFP
