PARIS, France (AFP) — Carlos the Jackal, once one of the world’s most wanted militants, must face trial for a deadly 1974 grenade attack in Paris, France’s highest appeals court ruled yesterday.
The 66-year-old Venezuelan, whose real name is Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, has been held in French jails since 1994 after he was tracked down in Sudan following a series of attacks and murders in France.
Court papers showed the judge rejected his appeal against being put on trial on charges of premeditated murder for his alleged role in the grenade attack on a pharmacy in an upmarket district of Paris that killed two and injured 34.
In an interview with the magazine
Al-Watan Al-Arabi back in 1979, Carlos allegedly admitted to having thrown the grenade that exploded in the pharmacy. But he contested that interview during the investigation into the attack.
In 1997, Carlos received the first of two life sentences for the 1975 murder of a civilian and two policemen more than two decades earlier.
Then in 2011, he was found guilty of masterminding attacks on two French passenger trains in 1982 and 1983, a train station in Marseille and a Libyan magazine office in Paris.
Carlos was given another life sentence for his role in those attacks, which left 11 people dead and nearly 150 injured.
He has denied any involvement in those attacks and said during the appeal process that the evidence gathered from intelligence files against him was unreliable.
The appeals court, however, upheld his conviction in 2013.
