Carlos the Jackal’s life sentence is upheld over the leftist militant’s 1974 grenade attack on a Champs Elysées shop that killed two
- The militant carried out several attacks in France in support of Palestinians
- He has been behind bars since 1994 but appealed one of his life sentences
- A special court confirmed his sentence for a 1974 attack on a Paris shop
Carlos the Jackal, the leftist militant behind some of the biggest attacks of the 1970s and 1980s in France, has failed to have one of his three life sentences reduced.
Following hearings that began on Wednesday, a special criminal court in Paris confirmed the life sentence for a 1974 grenade attack on the Publicis Drugstore, an upmarket shopping centre on the Champs Elysées, that killed two people.
The self-declared ‘professional revolutionary’, 71, whose real name is Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, carried out several attacks in support of the Palestinian cause.
Carlos the Jackal, the leftist militant behind some of the biggest attacks of the 1970s and 1980s in France, has failed to have one of his three life sentences reduced
A special criminal court in Paris confirmed the life sentence for a 1974 grenade attack on the Publicis Drugstore (pictured)
He has been behind bars in France since he was captured and spirited out of Sudan by French special forces in 1994.
He was convicted of murder in 2017 and sentenced to life in prison, a verdict that was upheld on appeal.
But in 2019, France’s highest court sent the case back to court to reconsider his sentence.
They said he should not have been convicted of both carrying and using a grenade because it amounted to being convicted twice of the same offence.
The self-styled revolutionary, whose real name is Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, has been behind bars in France since 1994
The self-styled revolutionary, whose real name is Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, has been behind bars in France since 1994 when French police caught up with him in Sudan after two decades on the run
He was convicted of murder in 2017
Ramirez, who was born in Venezuela, is already serving two other life terms and has lost appeals against them.
One is for the murder of two French police officers and an informant in June 1975 and the other for attacks on trains, a railway station and a Paris street in 1982 and 1983 that killed 11 people and wounded about 150 others.
In the 1970s and 1980s, the Marxist militant, became public enemy number one for Western governments and the world’ most wanted man.
He sealed his international notoriety by taking OPEC’s oil ministers hostage in the name of the Palestinian struggle in a raid on its Vienna headquarters in 1975 in which three people were killed.
The nickname was given to him by the media after a reporter saw a copy of Frederick Forsyth’s ‘The Day of the Jackal’ at Ramirez’s London flat.