Carlos, whose real name is Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, has spent the last 17 years at the La Sante prison in southern Paris after he was sentenced to life in 1997 for the killing of two French security officers and an alleged Lebanese informant in 1975.
On Monday, 62-year-old Sanchez, once a figure of the far left, appears before special anti-terrorism magistrates at the Justice Palace in the French capital in connection with deadly bombings in 1982 and 1983, in which at least 11 people were killed and another 150 injured.
French prosecutors say the attacks were part of a private terror campaign waged by Carlos against France to secure the release of his jailed comrade Bruno Breguet and then-girlfriend Magdalena Kopp, who were arrested in Paris driving a car carrying explosives in February 1982.
The first explosion hit the express train Le Capitole running from Paris to the southern city of Toulouse in March 1982, in which five people were killed and dozens wounded. This attack was claimed by the "International Terrorist Friends of Carlos"
The bombing was followed by a second explosion in April 1982 outside the Paris offices of anti-Syrian newspaper Al-Watan Al-Arabi on the same day as Breguet and Kopp were convicted in a French court. One person was killed and scores were injured.
On New Year’s Eve 1983, two bombs exploded, one in a high-speed TGV train travelling from the southern French city of Marseille to Paris, killing three people, and the another at the Marseille train station, killing a further two passengers. The attacks were claimed by a group calling itself the “Organisation for the Arab Armed Struggle”.
Evidence from the East
French prosecutors say recently revealed evidence from East Germany, Romania and Hungary proves Carlos’s involvement in the attacks. They also allege that he wrote two letters in which he claimed responsibility for the attacks.
Three of his alleged accomplices - Palestinian Kamal al-Issawi, and the German nationals Christa-Margot Froehlich and Johannes Weinrich - will be tried in absentia.
Carlos denies the charges. His lawyer and third wife, Isabelle Coutant-Peyre, whom he married in prison ten years ago, insists that the evidence from the former communist countries is unreliable...
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Tony Todd @'France24'
