PARIS—Once the world’s most-wanted fugitive, the man known as “Carlos the Jackal” appeared in a French court Monday for a deadly 1974 attack on a Paris shopping arcade, a trial that victims’ families awaited for decades.
The Venezuelan-born Ilich Ramirez Sanchez is accused of throwing a hand grenade from a mezzanine restaurant onto a shopping area in the French capital’s Latin Quarter. Two people were killed and 34 injured at the trendy Drugstore Publicis.
Known worldwide as Carlos, the 67-year-old is already serving a life sentence in France for a series of murders and attacks he has been convicted of perpetrating or organizing in the country on behalf of the Palestinian cause or communist revolution in the 1970s and ‘80s.
As the trial opened Monday, Carlos denounced it as a “gross manipulation of justice” 42 years after the attack. He has denied involvement and pleaded innocent.
The back and forth between him and a panel of judges provided some answers not usually heard from a criminal suspect asserting innocence.
Asked to state his profession, Carlos called himself a “professional revolutionary,” and said “I’m doing fine” in prison—after more than 20 years behind bars.
