Carlos the Jackal : Third French life sentence for notorious militant

Carlos the Jackal, a notorious Venezuelan militant serving two life sentences, has been handed a third by a French court, BBC has reported.

The self-styled revolutionary, whose real name is Ilich Ramirez Sanchez and is now 67, was convicted of a 1974 grenade attack on a Paris shop.

Ramirez threw a grenade into the shopping area, killing two and injuring 34 others, the court found.

He denied the charges and called the trial, 43 years later, “absurd”.

Born into a wealthy Venezuelan family, Ramirez studied in Moscow before joining a militant group, the Popular

Front for the Liberation of Palestine. He converted to Islam in 1975.

When his latest trial began in early March, he said that any killings he had committed had been carried out in the name of “the revolution” and condemned “scavenging” lawyers and “Zionist interests”.

“No-one has executed more people than me in the Palestinian resistance,” he said, “[and] I am the only survivor. In all the fighting, there were collateral victims, it’s unfortunate.”

Prosecutor Remi Crosson du Cormier told the court that “all evidence” gathered in the investigation pointed to Ramirez.

He admitted that investigators had found no DNA, fingerprints or CCTV evidence from the grenade attack, AFP news agency reports.

French television news BFMTV quoted Ramirez as saying he was ready to appeal the verdict if he was convicted. He has ten days to do so, the report adds.

Once the world’s most wanted fugitive, he was captured by elite French police in the Sudanese capital Khartoum in 1994.

By the time of his arrest, he had earned a reputation as a Marxist militant who had masterminded deadly bomb attacks, assassinations and hostage-takings.