Carlos the Jackal blows kisses in court during theatrical diatribe: 'Revolution is my job'

Raising his right fist in revolutionary salute as he entered the dock, man who was once the world's most wanted terrorist gives nationality as 'Venezuelan and Palestinian'

International terrorist Ilich Ramirez Sanchez (R), aka Carlos, arrives at the Criminal Court of the Palais de Justice in Paris on December 9, 2013. (AFP/Getty Images)

Carlos the Jackal, once the world’s most wanted terrorist, has appeared in a French court and launched an appeal against one of his life sentences by declaring: “I am a professional revolutionary; revolution is my job."

Described in the past as a “ladies’ man and cold-blooded killer”, now a strangely avuncular-looking 68-year-old, Carlos raised his right fist in revolutionary salute as he entered the dock of a specially constituted French appeal court, and blew a kiss towards the journalists on the press bench.

When asked to state his nationality, the man who had once been the subject of a worldwide manhunt declared he was of Venezuelan and Palestinian nationality, and resident “everywhere”.

Carlos, whose real name is Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, is appealing against his conviction for a 1974 grenade attack on the Publicis Drugstore shopping mall in Paris’ Left Bank area, in which two people died and 34 were wounded.

He received a life sentence for the crime after a 2017 trial in which he again declared himself a “professional revolutionary”, and told the five professional judges deciding on his guilt or innocence: "No one has executed more people than me in the Palestinian resistance."

On that occasion he gave his home address as “my mother’s place in Venezuela” – despite the fact he was already in jail serving two life sentences for murdering two French police officers in 1975 and for masterminding four bombings in in France that killed 11 and wounded nearly 150 in the 1980s.

In 2013 Carlos accepted “political and operational responsibility” for attacks in Europe committed by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) between 1970 and 1980, claiming: “It was war. Our comrades were being killed every day … I am a hero of the Palestinian resistance and I am the only survivor from the professional ranks in Europe because I shot first.”

But he has denied responsibility for the Publicis Drugstore attack, in which a grenade was thrown from a mezzanine onto shoppers in the mall below, producing what one survivor called “an eerie stampede of living dead”, including a boy aged about 12 who had his hand blown off.

The revolutionary’s defence team, which includes Isabelle Coutant-Peyre, his long-term lawyer whom he married in 2001, has argued that the case against him is “non-existent”.

They say no one who saw the attack was able to identify the man who threw the grenade. They have also accused witnesses of being manipulated by the security services and providing “contradictory and dishonest testimony”.

Speaking ahead of Monday’s court appearance, lawyer Francis Vuillemin, from Carlos’ defence team, said they were hoping for an acquittal.

"It's a very tough fight but the hardest battles are sometimes the most beautiful," he said. "Ilich Ramirez Sanchez is still his old self, in great shape, despite being 68 years old. He is going to fight like he always does, at each trial."

The prosecution, however, is expected to repeat its claims that Carlos launched the grenade attack in the hope of forcing the French government to release Yatsuka Furuya, a Japanese Red Army member who had been arrested at Orly Airport in July 1974.

Two days before the Publicis Drugstore attack of September 15 1974, Japanese Red Army members stormed the French embassy in The Hague, Netherlands, and took 11 hostages, demanding the release of Furuya, along with one million dollars and a getaway jet.

It has been claimed Carlos launched the grenade attack to put further pressure on the French to agree to the hostage takers’ demands.

The French released Furuya two days later, also providing a Boeing 707 and 300,000 dollars.

In his biography of the Jackal, however, the journalist John Follain said French police did not initially link the grenade attack to the embassy incident and in fact had no awareness of Carlos, who was then still a relative unknown.

Later, however, law enforcement officers realised the grenade thrown in the Publicis Drugstore and three grenades left behind by the embassy attackers were from the same batch of 75 stolen in 1972, reportedly by the Baader Meinhof gang, from a US military base in West Germany.

Last year’s trial heard that another one of the stolen grenades was found at the Paris home of Carlos’ mistress. Carlos, however, dismissed this discovery as a “manipulation”, while his cigar-smoking wife Ms Coutant-Peyre insisted: “Lots of people had access to those grenades at that time”.

The prosecution, however, also claimed Carlos was damned by his own words.

He was alleged to have boasted to Hans Joachim Klein, a former German comrade, that he had committed the attack to “apply pressure to get the Japanese man freed”.

The court also heard that in 1979 Carlos – by now a wanted fugitive – gave an interview to the pro-Iraqi Al Watan Al-Arabi magazine in which he confessed to the Drugstore attack.

Carlos, however, has strenuously denied giving any interview to Al Watan.

He also denied the 1982 car bombing of Al Watan’s Paris office. He was, though, convicted of this bombing in a prosecution that had to wait until 2011, after the release of files from the Stasi, communist East Germany's secret police, finally allowed all relevant evidence to be obtained.

Ahead of last year’s trial Georges Holleaux, the lawyer representing the two widows of the men killed in the Drugstore attack and 16 other people affected, told reporters: "The victims have been waiting so long for Carlos to be judged and convicted. Their wounds have never healed."

The cigar-smoking Ms Coutant-Peyre, however, accused the victims of being after compensation money, and claimed that after he was convicted, her husband was “laughing”.

“He enjoys the attention, the notoriety and he likes all the press he is getting,” Coutant-Peyre told Mailonline. “Carlos is already a condemned man in France, he will spend the rest of his days in prison, so this means nothing to him.”

Adding to the aura surrounding the Jackal is the claim in Follain’s biography that he had been among the first to visit the Publicis Drugstore complex after it reopened following the grenade attack.

Despite spending his life as a communist revolutionary, Carlos was born into a life of privilege as the son of wealthy Venezuelan lawyer.

His lawyer father, however, was also a committed Marxist and ensured Carlos received an education that was heavy in left-wing political theory.

At the same time the young Ramirez - as Carlos was before adopting his alias – travelled extensively with his socialite mother, and according to some accounts acquired a taste for a rather luxurious playboy lifestyle.

He is said to have started studying at Patrice Lumumba People’s Friendship University in Moscow before being expelled for poor discipline and poor academic performance in 1970.

Soon afterwards, he travelled to Jordan for weapons training with the PFLP, adopting the nom de guerre Carlos.

The “Jackal” epithet was added by a journalist after a copy of the Frederick Forsyth thriller The Day of a Jackal was found at a London flat Carlos used – although it later turned out the book belonged to another, innocent tenant.

Despite his awesome reputation, some of the Jackal’s attacks were comic failures.

An attempt to fire a rocket-propelled grenade at an El Al jet at Orly Airport in January 1975 ended with him and an accomplice causing more damage to the window of their hire car than they did to the plane: Carlos’ inexperienced comrade forgot to brace himself against the recoil of the RPG.

But it is said that at one point the Stasi provided Carlos with an East German HQ and more than 70 support staff.

He was finally captured in Khartoum, Sudan, in 1994, in an operation involving French special forces, who arranged for him to be tranquilised, tied up, and bundled onto a military plane heading for Paris.

In 1997 he received his first life sentence for murdering two police officers and an informant in Paris in 1975.

In 2011 he was convicted of the Al Watan attack, the bombing of a train heading between Paris and Toulouse in 1982, and for masterminding the bombings on New Year’s Eve 1983 of a Marseille train station and a TGV train between Marseille and Paris.

His 2013 appeal against his 2011 convictions saw him give a four-hour address to the court, during which he claimed evidence against him had been falsified by "manipulators serving foreign powers" and accused French investigators of being "agents of the American embassy".