"Carlos the Jackal" – will go on trial for terrorist activities for the first time in Paris today.
The Venezuelan-born Sanchez, 62, who became a symbol of the "cruel but cool" international terrorism of the 1970s, is already serving life sentences in France for murdering two policemen and an informer.
Now, for six weeks from today, he will be tried for his alleged role in organising four terror attacks in France in 1982 and 1983, including an explosion aboard an express train in which five people died. It will be the first time that Sanchez, a self-styled "professional international revolutionary", has been tried for terror activities in an alleged 20-year career that began with the wounding of the Marks & Spencer boss, Joseph Sieff, in London in December 1973.
Sanchez was kidnapped from Sudan in 1994 by French intelligence agents and jailed for life in 1997 for three murders committed in Paris in 1975. The trial beginning today is the result of a ponderous investigation by French anti-terrorism magistrates, which included getting hard-won access to the archives of former Soviet bloc intelligence agencies.
A special assize court in Paris, with seven judges sitting instead of a jury, will hear evidence that Sanchez planned four terrorist attacks on French soil in 1982-83 in which 11 people were killed.
Prosecutors will say that Sanchez masterminded the four attacks as part of an attempt to blackmail France into releasing his German wife, Magdalena Kopp, and a Swiss associate, Bruno Bréguet, who were arrested in Paris in 1982 for possessing weapons and explosives. The hearings are expected to reveal publicly for the first time evidence of links between Sanchez and Soviet bloc intelligence.
The round face and the Che Guevara beret of Carlos the Jackal became the symbol of a kind of rootless, international terrorism linked to the Palestinian cause from the mid-1970s. On 21 December, 1975, he led the attack on a meeting in Vienna of the oil producing cartel Opec in which 70 senior politicians and officials were taken hostage. This operation is now believed to have been sponsored by the Libyan leader, Muammar Gaddafi. An attempt by Austria to extradite Sanchez from France to face charges for the Opec attack was refused by a French court of appeal in 1999.
The true motivation and ideology of "Carlos" has always been open to doubt – a confusion encouraged by Sanchez himself. Leaders of the radical Palestinian cause are reported to have lost patience with his jet-set lifestyle in the late 1980s. He spent some years in the eastern bloc before taking refuge in Syria and then Sudan.
Even from prison in France over the past 17 years, he has managed to keep alive his image as an enigmatic charmer. In 2001 he "married" his lawyer Isabelle Coutant-Peyre, 58, in an Islamic ceremony which has no status under French law. Ms Coutant-Peyre will be one of two defence lawyers at his trial. His lawyers are expected to argue that evidence of his involvement in the French attacks is sparse and based on "unreliable" archives of Soviet intelligence.
John Lichfield
Friday, 29 October 2010
EAST GERMANY SANCTUARY
In the West he was for decades one of the world's most wanted leftist terrorists, but in communist East Berlin, Carlos the Jackal was given a headquarters with 75 support staff and allowed to walk the streets with an automatic pistol slung from his belt.
The extraordinary life of Illich Ramirez Sanchez – the internationally renowned terrorist now serving a life sentence in Paris for triple murder – behind the Iron Curtain began to emerge yesterday from a mass of torn East German Stasi files that are slowly being put back together by the German authorities.
Sanchez, who was nicknamed "Carlos the Jackal" when it became known that police once found a copy of Frederick Forsyth's novel The Day of the Jackal among his belongings, is reported to be responsible for the deaths of at least 80 people during a terrorist career spanning 25 years. Carlos, an acclaimed film about his life, went on general release this week.
For decades he worked as a hit man for the left-wing Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) leading a murderous if spectacular raid on the Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries' Vienna headquarters in 1975. Sixty hostages were taken and three people were shot dead.
But a year later the Venezuelan-born Sanchez, who was given his first name Illich by his Leninist lawyer father, found himself expelled from the PFLP and tyring to form his own guerrilla group, the Organisation of Armed Struggle. It was then that Sanchez turned to East Germany. As the Stasi's reconstituted secret police files revealed yesterday, the hardline communist regime afforded Carlos hitherto unimagined levels of assistance.
According to Germany's Focus magazine, which gained access to the files, Sanchez formed a pact with East Germany in the late 1970s. The communist authorities allowed him to run a headquarters in East Berlin which was staffed by 75 helpers hand-picked by the Stasi.
"While the West's security forces were feverishly trying to track down and arrest him, Sanchez remained completely at ease in East Berlin," said one of the Focus journalists. "His Stasi minders wrote reports about how he used to ride around in West German cars with his friends and walk across the city's main square with a pistol attached to his belt," he added.
Sanchez's support staff included East German university lecturers, actors, trade union functionaries, nurses, mechanics and even a doctor. They helped furnish him with safe houses, apartments for conspiratorial meetings, "secure" telephone lines and ensured that his car, always a West German model, was kept in perfect running order.
The Stasi helped not only Sanchez, but also arranged doctors' appointments for his then girlfriend, Magdalena Kopp, and her colleague, the West German terrorist Johannes Weinrich.
East Germany's support for Sanchez was apparently far greater than the assistance given by the regime to West Germany's Red Army Faction. The terrorist group carried out a string of bombing, kidnappings and murders in 1970s and 80s. Its members were given safe houses in East Germany when they were on the run from the West German authorities. East Germany also had close links with Palestinian groups and Libya.
From East Berlin, Sanchez is believed to have planned attacks on Radio Free Europe's office in Munich and a 1983 attack on West Berlin's Maison de France, a French cultural centre, which killed one man and injured 22 others. Bomb attacks on two French TGV trains which killed four and injured dozens followed in the same year. According to the files, Sanchez's close links with the Stasi enabled the secret police to put pressure on him to refrain from carrying out terrorist attacks at sensitive moments. When the former Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev visited West Germany in November 1981, the files show that the KGB submitted a request to the Stasi to intervene to "prevent any activities" by Sanchez during the visit. The request apparently worked, because, although western intelligence was aware that the group was planning an imminent West German attack, the visit passed off without incident.
The revelations about Sanchez have emerged from some 15,500 rubbish sacks stuffed with torn or shredded secret police files that Stasi officers frantically tried to destroy in the aftermath of the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. The sacks were meant to be taken to rubbish dumps and burned, but protesters occupied East Berlin's Stasi headquarters and prevented their removal.
However it was not until 1995 that reunited Germany began attempting to reconstitute the damaged files using archivists to do the painstaking work by hand. Two years ago staff at the government office which oversees the files reported that they had managed to put together 900,000 Stasi file pages from 400 of the sacks. The contents have helped further to expose the iniquities of a secret police system in a state in which around every fourth citizen was an informer. A computer is now being used in a pilot study designed to rebuild the files electronically.
French
