Venezuelan serving life in French prison gives rambling testimony on first day of trial over 1974 Paris grenade attack

This article is more than 3 years old

This article is more than 3 years old

Carlos the Jackal – once one of the world’s most wanted criminals – has told a French court he is a “professional revolutionary” on the first day of his trial over a 1974 grenade attack in Paris that killed two people.

The Venezuelan, whose real name is Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, has been held in France for 23 years after being captured in Khartoum, Sudan, by French special forces and was previously sentenced to life in jail for deadly attacks in the 1970s and 1980s.

In his latest trial, he faces charges including murder over an attack on the Publicis drugstore in central Paris during which 34 people were injured. Ramírez denies involvement.

Carlos the Jackal ‘in London’: from the archive, 8 July 1975 Read more

Now 67, Ramírez refused to give his name in court and gave his age as 17, “give or take 50 years”.

“I have been a professional revolutionary since I was a teenager,” he said on Monday.

In long monologues, Ramírez mixed references to the Israeli and French secret services with complaints of “coarse manipulations of justice” before being advised by the judge to give shorter answers.

Ramírez was sitting in a glass box with three police officers flanking him. He kissed the hand of his lawyer, Isabelle Coutant-Peyre, who is also his partner, before blowing kisses to the media.

In the 70s and 80s, the Marxist militant and self-proclaimed “elite gunman” became a symbol of cold war anti-imperialism. He sealed his notoriety in 1975 with the hostage-taking of Opec oil ministers in Vienna in the name of the Palestinian struggle, and went on to become an international gun-for-hire.

He was convicted in 1997 of murdering two French police officers and an informant in 1975 in Paris, and in 2011 of masterminding attacks on two trains, a train station and a Paris street that killed 11 people and wounded about 150.

Investigators say they have established links between the Publicis case, Ramírez, and a hostage-taking at the French embassy in The Hague two days previously by the Japanese Red Army militant group.

The US-made hand grenade used in the Publicis attack came from the same batch as three grenades used in The Hague attack and another grenade found in a Paris apartment used by Ramírez, they say.

Some years later, in a newspaper interview Ramírez now denies giving, he was quoted as claiming responsibility for the drugstore attack, saying its aim was to put pressure on French authorities to wrap up negotiations with the hostage-takers in The Hague.

Speaking before the trial, one of Ramírez’s lawyers, Francis Vuillemin, said the charges against his client were non-existent. He attacked “contradictory and dishonest” testimony in the case and a procedure that he said had not respected the law.

Seventeen witnesses are expected to testify at the trial, which is likely to last until the end of March.