Carlos the Jackal tried for French train bomb attacks

[John Ashworth]

Carlos the Jackal shows he has not lost the ability to provoke at his Paris trial

With his anorak and reading glasses, the revolutionary looks a long way from his heyday, but he is still a divisive figure

Kim Willsher in Paris
guardian.co.uk, Monday 7 November 2011 16.38 GMT

In his heyday he was Carlos the Jackal: romanticised hero of the people's revolution to some; reviled killer and terrorist to others. But as he entered the bullet-proof dock of a Paris court on Monday, Venezuelan-born Ilich Ramírez Sánchez appeared to be a shadow of the imperialist scourge he had once been.

The trademark mop of dark hair, leather jacket, sunglasses and clean-shaven square-jawed face – reportedly altered by plastic surgery to avoid capture – had gone. Instead, there stood a 62-year-old man with receding grey hair, matching beard and reading glasses, wearing what looked suspiciously like an anorak and needing a chair because of "back problems".

But then the high-security trial of Sánchez and four others for a series of bomb blasts in Paris nearly 30 years ago opened, and "Carlos" revealed that he may be older and creakier, but he has lost none of his ability to provoke and polarise.

Asked by the president of a specially convened panel of seven judges to state his occupation, Sánchez replied "professional revolutionary", adding, "in the Leninist tradition".

He claimed that although born in Venezuela, he was given Palestinian nationality by the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, whose cause he espoused.

Spotting a supporter, he stood to give a clenched-fist salute, the symbol of communism that was adopted by so many revolutionary causes, smiling defiantly into the courtroom, waving and mouthing indecipherable messages.

Sánchez has been in jail in France since 1994, when he was kidnapped by French intelligence agents in Sudan and shipped to Paris. Three years later he was sentenced to life imprisonment for the killing of two police officers and an informer in 1975.

He is on trial for allegedly organising four bomb attacks across France in 1982 and 1983 – including two on high-speed trains – in which 11 people died and 200 were injured.

Three other members of his organisation, also accused of the bombings, are being tried in their absence.

According to French prosecutors, Sánchez masterminded the attacks to force the authorities to free his German then girlfriend, Magdalena Kopp, and Swiss national Bruno Bréguet, both members of his international revolutionary group.

Sánchez, who denies any involvement in the attacks, is being defended by his wife, the lawyer Isabelle Coutant-Peyre, whom he married in prison in 2000.

As the trial kicked off with a legal argument over whether, after nearly 30 years, the charges had passed their time limit, Sánchez swayed from looking defiant to bored, scratched his beard, chatted to his guards, whispered to his wife, read newspaper cuttings and gesticulated to people in the courtroom.

At regular intervals the hearing took a theatrical turn. A large man, followed by an even larger figure who appeared to be a bodyguard, got up to leave, stopped by the dock and nodded to Sánchez who waved and blew kisses back. The figure was the controversial French comedian, actor and political activist Dieudonné, who has been condemned by the courts more than once for his antisemitic outbursts.

Bernard Ripert, lawyer for one of the absent accused, managed to condemn "imperialist" wars in Libya, Iraq and Afghanistan, the treatment of Palestinians and the dropping of corruption charges against the former president Jacques Chirac almost in one breath.

He said the statute of limitations for the charges against Sánchez was 10 years, not three decades.

"Nobody is asking anyone to forgive or forget," he said, addressing the victims of the French blasts sitting opposite. "We demand the law be respected, that's all."

He added that the associations representing the civil plaintiffs in court "make me laugh".

"They want to turn this hearing into a lynching," he said.

When the exchange between lawyers became heated, Sánchez leaped to his feet: "I witnessed my first shooting at 13, when my best friend died in my arms after the police gunned him down," he said. "I have lots of respect for the victims but there are many people, innocent people, who find themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time.

"What about those who were deported during the war? We respect them all, but the survivors have exploited this in the racist, Zionist state of Israel."

Applause broke out among a group of young men at the back of the court, prompting a warning against "any demonstrations" from the president, Olivier Leurent.

The rest of the time Sánchez regarded the proceedings with a smile, sometimes verging on a mocking smirk.

Attacking Francis Szpiner, lawyer for a victims' organisation, Ripert could hardly contain himself. "The trouble with you is you think everything you say is right and everything anyone else says is bullshit," he interjected. "You say times have changed, but the revolutionary cause is eternal."

Even before the case opened, Sánchez had shown his defiance in an interview with the Venezuelan newspaper El Nacional on Sunday in which he claimed he had killed up to 2,000 people in more than 100 attacks during his career as an international revolutionary. Until now, Sánchez had only ever admitted taking 70 people hostage during a meeting of the OPEC oil-producing countries in Austria in December 1975, which led to three deaths.

The trial is set to run for six weeks.