PARIS – For two decades until his capture in 1994, Carlos the Jackal murdered, bombed and kidnapped his way to infamy, retaining the title of world’s most dangerous terrorist before Osama bin Laden stole his crown.
But speaking from the Clair-vaux prison in northeast France last week, he berated terrorist cells said to have targeted Britain, criticizing them for plotting to kill ordinary people.
In his first telephone interview with a newspaper, the Venezuelan-born Vladimir Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, 57, said he was saddened by any loss of life in London, where he lived as a young man.
Sanchez is serving a life sentence for three murders in Paris in 1975. He will go on trial again in January over four bomb attacks in France in 1982 and 1983 that killed 12 people.
Sanchez, now overweight and diabetic, showed no remorse, laughing when asked about the number of his victims. “I’m not a sadist or a masochist – I don’t enjoy the suffering of others,” he claimed. “When we had to eliminate them, it was in a cold, simple way with the least pain possible.”
His most audacious attack was the kidnapping of 11 oil ministers in Vienna in 1975, which elicited an estimated $20 million ransom. He eluded the CIA and French intelligence with the help of Col. Moammar Khadafy, the Libyan leader, Saddam Hussein in Iraq and a network of bases behind the Iron Curtain.
“Kensington and Chelsea were places where I spent my youth, so I’m not happy about people getting killed in the streets of London,” he said.
He condemned al Qaeda followers without specific targets, saying: “They are not professionals. They’re not organized. They don’t even know how to make proper explosives or proper detonators.”
Sanchez was a self-styled “professional revolutionary” who studied in Moscow in the 1960s before signing up with a Palestinian guerrilla movement.
In 1975, Sanchez shot dead two unarmed counterintelligence officers and an informer near the Sorbonne. When a journalist found a copy of Frederick Forsyth’s thriller “The Day of the Jackal” at his apartment in Bayswater, west London, the nickname “Carlos the Jackal” followed.
In 1982, Carlos launched what French prosecutors call “a private war” when his then-girlfriend, Magdalena Kopp, and an accomplice were arrested in Paris with a car full of explosives. He is accused of blowing up two trains, the Marseilles railway station and a Paris street to secure Kopp’s freedom. She married Sanchez and had a daughter.
Asked about his victims, he said: “I don’t know how many I’ve killed . . . I’ve been fighting since I was 14. Fighting, fighting. Do you know how many people got killed in these fights?”
The French say the number was 83, but he said: “I couldn’t count. Less than 100 anyway.”
And what had those deaths achieved? “Our example has been followed, not only by communists but even by jihadists.”
In 1991, he settled in Amman but sent his wife and daughter to live in Venezuela. He later married Lana Jarrar, a Jordanian 19 years his junior.
Since his arrest, he has been married again, this time to his lawyer, Isabelle Coutant-Peyre.
“I think things are more difficult for her than for me, but this is the price to pay for one’s struggle against the empire,” he said. Sunday Times of London