Police killer Carlos the Jackal gets life for historical terror bombing of Paris

A double police killer and once one of Europe’s most wanted terror suspects has been given his third life sentence for a deadly bombing more than 40 years ago.

Ilyich Ramirez Sanchez, widely known as Carlos the Jackal and the perpetrator of headline-grabbing attacks in the 1970s and early 1980s was convicted in a French court on Tuesday (March 28) for the atrocity on a Paris shop.

Prosecutor Remi Crosson du Cormier told the court in Paris that “all evidence gathered in this investigation points to Carlos” while admitting that investigators had found no DNA, fingerprints or CCTV evidence from the grenade attack on the Drugstore Publicis that left two dead and 34 injured on September 15, 1974.

With attention in France now focused on the ever-present threat of jihadist attacks, the trial in Paris reached back to a time when Europe was repeatedly targeted by ruthless groups sympathetic to the Palestinian cause.

The defendant, already serving two life terms for murder including two police officers in Paris in 1975, blew kisses at supporters at the start of the hearing, taking the stand to denounce the “absurdity of a trial held 43 years after the fact”.

Lawyers for the 67-year-old Venezuela native had derided the two-week trial as “judicial palaeontology”.

Defence lawyer Francis Vuillemin, calling for an acquittal, said a conviction would only feed the cult status of his client, who has been in prison in France since he was arrested by French elite police in the Sudanese capital Khartoum in 1994.

“If you convict him, he wins, if you acquit him, he loses,” Vuillemin told the three-judge panel. “So acquit Carlos and he will take it out on his lawyers.”

Ramirez boasted at the start of the trial: “No one in the Palestinian resistance has executed more people than I have.”

He has claimed personal responsibility for 80 deaths but repeatedly denied responsibility for the Paris attack on the store in the upmarket Left Bank district of Saint-Germain.

Ramirez argued that he should not be required to testify against himself and said he faced death if he divulged operational information.

On Tuesday he returned to his “Palestinian resistance” rulebook, saying: “You don`t snitch, and you don`t cooperate with a court you don`t recognise.”

Little known at the time of the Drugstore Publicis attack, Ramirez rose to international notoriety the following year when his commando group burst into a meeting of the powerful OPEC oil cartel in Vienna, taking 11 people hostage. Three people were killed.

In addition to killing the officers, Ramirez was also 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.

He was dubbed ‘Carlos the Jackal’ by the media when he evaded international security services while on the run.

The nickname came from a fictional terrorist in the 1971 Frederick Forsyth novel, ‘The Day of the Jackal’, which was turned into a popular film.

Georges Holleaux, a lawyer representing the two widows of the officers killed and 16 other people affected by the attacks, said before the trial that his clients relished the chance of seeing Ramirez face justice.