Carlos the Jackal back in French dock for 1980s bombings
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Dapper Venezuelan militant Carlos the Jackal goes on trial in a Paris court on Tuesday charged with four deadly bombings carried out almost 30 years ago as extreme-left wing attacks ravaged Europe.
The cravat-wearing Marxist-Leninist radical, 62, whose real name is Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, is already serving a life sentence in France for the murder of two French policemen and an informant in 1975.
Ahead of his trial, Carlos boasted in an interview with Venezuelan newspaper El Nacional of committing more than 100 attacks that claimed up to 2,000 lives.
Asked about civilian bystanders who lost their lives in his attacks, he told the paper: "There were very few. I calculated that they were fewer than 10 per cent. "So out of 1,500 - 2,000 killed, there were not more than 200 civilian victims," he said.
Carlos, born in 1949, rose to prominence in 1975 when his commando group burst into the conference room where ministers from the powerful OPEC oil cartel were meeting in Vienna, taking 11 hostage.
He is now on trial for 1982 and 1983 attacks billed as part of a private war Carlos waged against France to free two comrades, including his future wife, who were arrested in Paris while planning to attack the Kuwaiti embassy.
The first bombing on March 29, 1982 aboard the ‘Le Capitole’ express train running from Paris to the southern city of Toulouse killed five people and wounded 28. The attack was claimed by the ‘International Terrorist Friends of Carlos’ and was followed by another on April 22, 1982: the Paris car bombing of anti-Syrian newspaper Al-Watan Al-Arabi that killed a passer-by and wounded 60.
The bomb struck on the same day that Carlos's comrades Bruno Breguet from Switzerland and Magdalena Kopp, who would become Carlos's wife, were convicted in a French court of the foiled Kuwait embassy attack.
Two final attacks took place on New Year's Eve 1983, the first targeting a high-speed TGV train travelling from Marseillle to Paris, killing three people and wounding 13.
Moments later, the bombing of a Marseille train station killed two people.
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