One of the world’s most famous criminals is to go on trial for bomb attacks that killed 11 people in France in 1982 and 1983. Ilitch Ramirez Sanchez, better known as Carlos the Jackal, is already serving a life sentence for the murder of two French secret service officers in 1975.

Advertising Read more

A volunteer for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, the 61-year-old Venezuelan has regularly been branded an international terrorist. The one crime he admits to is an attack on the headquarters of Opec in Vienna in 1975, during which three people died and 66 hostages were seized.

He was finally arrested by French agents in Khartoum, Sudan in 1994, before being sentenced to life in a French prison in December 1997.

Sanchez will appear at a court in Paris between 2 November and 16 December, charged with several attacks throughout France in the 1980s, it was confirmed on Thursday .

These include a bomb attack on a Toulouse-Paris train in March 1982 that killed five people and an attack on the office of the Al-Watan Al-Arabi magazine in Paris in which one person died.

He’s also facing charges in relation to an attack on a Marseille train station, during which two people died, and a TGV train in December 1983, when three people were killed.

More than 100 people were injured in the four attacks.

Three members of his entourage, “Ali” Kamal AL-Issawi, Christa-Margot Froehlich and Johannes Weinrich, will also face trial.

Daily newsletterReceive essential international news every morning Subscribe