One of the most
sought-after terrorist suspects of
the Cold War smiled slightly when asked to identify himself to the
waiting courtroom today.
"My name is Ilich Ramirez Sanchez. My profession is
professional revolutionary. The world is my domain. My last address
was Khartoum, in Sudan.''
With that, trial opened for the man better known as Carlos the
Jackal -- a flamboyant mastermind of bombings, assassinations and
hostage dramas that terrified and horrified. By his own count, he
killed 83 people.
After decades eluding authorities, Ramirez is now being tried
on
manslaughter charges in the 1975 Paris killings of two French
agents and a man he suspected as an informer. Prosecutors hope to
put the 48-year-old former communist terrorist behind bars for 30
years.
Though his terrorist ties are believed to have dried up and his
East bloc backers lost their jobs with the Soviet collapse, French
authorities took no chances with security for the weeklong trial of
the Venezuelan-born Ramirez.
Ramirez arrived at the Palais de Justice in a convoy of police
brandishing submachine guns. Sharpshooters stood guard around the
building and all its entrances were equipped with body scanners.
Authorities assigned two bodyguards and a chauffeur to each of
the nine jurors, nine alternates and three judges.
Ramirez, his hair and mustache graying, cut a debonair figure
in
court, dressed in a tan overcoat and cream-colored polo shirt, an
ascot around his neck, gold-rimmed glasses sitting on his nose.
As the six women jurors stepped to the front of the courtroom,
the defendant, long known as a lady's man, beamed a smile at each
one, drawing laughter from the public.
Then, growing serious, he addressed the court in heavily
accented French, taking his defense into his own hands to argue
that the case should be thrown out.
"I can't be judged because of the conditions of my arrest,''
Ramirez said, referring to his capture in Sudan in August 1994.
Reportedly, his captors gave him an injection and spirited him out
of the country in a sack.
The court ended its session, after two brief recesses, without
ruling on the dismissal request. Trial is to resume Monday.
Security in the capital already had been increased during this
month's trial of suspected Muslim militants linked to
Algerian-related terror bombings in recent years.
Aside from deadly bombings and killings in France, Ramirez is
most infamous for his participation in the 1972 massacre of 11
Israeli athletes by Palestinian commandos at the Munich Olympics.
He plotted the 1975 seizure of OPEC oil ministers and the 1976
Palestinian hijacking of a French jetliner to Entebbe, Uganda, that
ended with an Israeli commando raid.
Ramirez was trained as a guerrilla in Cuba and Moscow and
joined
the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.
Twenty-two years ago, in June 1975, he was posing as a student
in a tiny Latin Quarter apartment near the Sorbonne when two
unarmed investigators knocked on his door.
Raymond Dous and Jean Donatini, of the Direction de la Securite
du Territoire -- France's FBI -- were probing an attack on Israel's
El Al airlines at Paris' Orly Airport in January of that year.
Arriving at 9 rue Tollier with the two investigators was Michel
Moukharbal, a fellow militant arrested earlier that month.
Moukharbal pointed to Ramirez as a suspect and Ramirez opened fire,
killing him and the two agents before fleeing the country.
Ramirez was convicted in absentia in 1992, but French law
requires a retrial upon the suspect's return to the country.
Ramirez's fingerprints on the pistol and his description of the
killings in an interview are giving the prosecution a virtually
open-and-shut case. But observers say he might use his secrets to
work out a deal that could eventually get him out of jail or secure
his early release.
Bernard Violet, author of "Carlos -- The Secret Networks of
International Terrorism,'' said Ramirez has information about other
terrorist groups, including Algeria's Armed Islamic Group and
Hamas, that French intelligence covets.
Ramirez has spent his time behind bars reading up on French law
and studying the language. He and his lawyers were expected to ask
the court to throw out the case, contending he was illegally
abducted by French agents in Sudan.
"He will use the arms needed for that battlefield, and that's
to use legal means to say what he wants to say politically,'' a
lawyer for Ramirez, Isabelle Coutant-Peyre, told The Associated
Press.
© 1997Associated
Press.
