CARLOS THE JACKEL (A)

043093, 1978Carlos the Jackal (born Ilich Ramírez Sánchez on October 12, 1949) is a Venezuelan terrorist convicted of murder in France who has worked with and for causes associated with communists, Arab nationalists and Islamists. He is serving a life sentence in prison. He was named after Lenin by his father who was a Leninist, and he soon joined the youth movement of national communist party. He enrolled in a university in Moscow which was noted for recruiting foreign communists.In 1970, he volunteered for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), which was best known for pioneering notorious airline hijackings by terrorists. In Lebanon, he finished his training at a school staffed by Iraqi military. After several bungled bombings, he achieved notoriety for a 1975 raid on the OPEC headquarters in Vienna, which killed three people. This was followed by a string of attacks against Western targets. For many years he was among the most wanted international fugitives. Carlos was called The Jackal by The Guardian when Frederick Forsyth's novel The Day of the Jackal was reportedly found among his belongings.Arrested in Sudan in 1994 and flown to France, he is now serving a life sentence in the Clairvaux Prison for the murder of two French agents of the DST (counter-intelligence) and an alleged informant.[1] In 2001, he married his lawyer in a Muslim ceremony. Carlos advocates radical Islamism in his book Revolutionary Islam, which expresses support for the terrorist attacks of Osama bin Laden as well as Saddam Hussein for resisting the United States.From Beirut, Carlos participated in the planning for the attack on the headquarters of OPEC in Vienna. On December 21, 1975, he led the six-person team (which included Gabriele Kröcher-Tiedemann) that assaulted the meeting of OPEC leaders and took over sixty hostages, killing an Austrian policeman, an Iraqi OPEC employee and a member of the Libyan delegation. Carlos demanded that the Austrian authorities read a communiqué about the Palestinian cause on the Austrian radio and television networks every two hours. To avoid the threatened execution of a hostage every 15 minutes, the Austrian government agreed and the communiqué was broadcast as requested.On December 22, the rebels and forty-two hostages were given an airplane and flown to Algiers. Ex-Royal Navy pilot Neville Atkinson, at that time the personal pilot for Libya's leader Muammar al-Gaddafi, was given the task of flying Carlos and a number of other terrorists, including Hans-Joachim Klein, a supporter of the imprisoned Baader-Meinhof group and a member of the Revolutionary Cells, and Gabriele Kröcher-Tiedemann, from Algiers.[11] The terrorists were finally dispatched in Baghdad. Thirty hostages were freed; the DC-9 was then flown on to Tripoli, where more hostages were freed before flying back to Algiers where the remaining hostages were freed and the rebels were granted asylum.In the years following the OPEC raid, Bassam Abu Sharif and Klein claimed that Carlos had received a large sum of money in exchange for the safe release of the Arab hostages and had kept it for his personal use. There is still some uncertainty regarding the amount that changed hands but it is believed to be between US$20 million and US$50 million. The source of the money is also uncertain, but, according to Klein, it was from

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