France: Pro-Palestinian old-time terrorist 'Carlos the Jackal' back on Paris trial

Via The Daily Mail:

" am a hero of the
Palestinian resistance"

Notorious terrorist Carlos the Jackal to go on trial for the deadly bombing of a Paris shop more than 40 years ago  

• A terrorist currently serving life in prison is to appear in court on Monday accused of throwing a grenade into a busy Paris shopping parade over forty years ago.  

Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, also known as Carlos the Jackal, is set to face charges connected to the deadly attack at a Paris' shopping mall in 1974 that claimed the lives of two people and injured dozens more.  

The Venezuelan-born Ramirez Sanchez, one of the most notorious political terrorists of the 1970s and '80s, is serving a life sentence in France for a series of seperate murders and attacks he perpetrated or organized in the country on behalf of the Palestinian cause or communist revolution. 

He first was convicted by a French court 20 years ago, and again in 2011 and 2013. If convicted on first-degree murder charges in the latest trial, he could get a third life sentence. 

Ramirez Sanchez, 67, is scheduled to appear in a Paris court for allegedly throwing a hand grenade from a mezzanine restaurant onto a shopping arcade in the French capital's Latin Quarter in September 1974. Two people were killed and dozens injured.

At the time of the attack, Ramirez Sanchez had not yet been dubbed 'Carlos the Jackal' or become one of the world's most wanted fugitives. He was 24 years old and already had joined the organization Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

The nickname came from a fictional terrorist in the 1971 Frederick Forsyth novel, 'The Day of the Jackal', which was turned into a popular film.  (...)

It was in the name of the Palestinian cause that he subsequently became the military chief of the PFLP in Europe, claiming the 'operational and political responsibility' for all the operations of the group on the continent and also for 'all the wounded and all the dead,' according to court documents. 

'I am a hero of the Palestinian resistance, and I am the only survivor of (the group's) professional executives in Europe because I used to shoot first,' he told investigators.

Carlos was arrested in Sudan by the French intelligence services in 1994, 20 years after the first attack blamed on him in France.

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