Dreaded 'Jackal' Cut Down to Size

PARIS -- Carlos "The Jackal," once the swaggering star of international urban guerrillas, is now an overweight middle-aged playboy resigned to spending the rest of his life in a French jail for a triple slaying in 1975.


A French court sentenced him early Wednesday to life in prison after convicting him of shooting dead two French secret agents and a Lebanese fellow revolutionary turned informant.


The 48-year-old Venezuelan-born revolutionary, who is blamed for more than 80 killings and hundreds of injuries during his pro-Palestinian struggle in the 1970s and 1980s, turned his trial into something of a circus.


He cracked jokes and made sarcastic remarks, frequently jumping to his feet to interrupt testimony and question a witness, lecture the judge or brag about his guerrilla exploits.


"I am a professional revolutionary," he told the court, proudly claiming "moral responsibility" for all attacks by George Habash's radical Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.


A man who thrived on danger and loved women, wine and Havana cigars when he roamed the world, Carlos has spent the past three years in a prison cell while awaiting trial.


He managed to flee justice for two decades, shuttling between Arab capitals and Eastern bloc countries that backed him in his war against the West until support for him collapsed with the end of the Cold War and a push for peace in the Middle East.


A French court sentenced him to life imprisonment in his absence in June 1992 for killing French secret agents Jean Donatini and Raymond Duos, as well as Michel Moukharbal, a man he knew as a Palestinian sympathizer who went to the police.


Carlos was born in 1950, the son of a fervently left-wing doctor of law who gave his sons the names of the founder of Bolshevism -- Ilyich, Vladimir and Lenin.


The press dubbed him "The Jackal" after the assassin sent to kill French President Charles de Gaulle in Frederick Forsyth's novel "The Day of the Jackal."


Carlos was linked to many of the most spectacular guerrilla attacks of the 1970s, particularly the 1975 kidnapping of 11 oil ministers at an OPEC meeting in Vienna.


Educated in London before his father sent him and his brother Lenin to Moscow's Patrice Lumumba University, he impressed his OPEC captives in 1975 with his ability to speak English, Spanish, French, German and Arabic.


Law enforcement authorities say Carlos cut his teeth in the killing game in 1973 with the attempted murder of Marks and Spencer store chief Edward Sieff, a prominent British Zionist, in London.


In 1979 he boasted in the Paris-based Arabic magazine al-Watan-al-Arabi that his favorite method of killing was shooting a victim in the face.


His fingerprints were found on a letter sent to the French government in March 1982 threatening reprisals if his German companion Magdalena Kopp and another activist, Bruno Breguet, were not released.


On the day Kopp and Breguet were jailed by a French court on arms and explosives charges, a car bomb exploded in Paris, killing one person and wounding 60.


It is one of three Paris bombings for which he is under investigation by French Judge Jean-Louis Bruguiere.


Bruguiere is also investigating a possible connection with a 1983 bombing which killed five in Marseille's train station, and two bomb attacks on French trains in 1982 and 1983 in which seven people died.


Carlos is also blamed for organizing the Japanese Red Army occupation of the French Embassy in The Hague in December 1974, the bombing of a crowded Paris drugstore in December 1974, a rocket attack on a plane at Paris's Orly airport and plots to assassinate business and political leaders.


While he acknowledged his part in some of the attacks, the mythology that grew up around him ensured that his every move -- or supposed move -- became news.


According to unsubstantiated reports, he was invited to leave Damascus in 1991 and was refused refuge by Tripoli and Baghdad, which had given him sanctuary in the previous two decades.


He at last found shelter in Sudan in 1993, passing the time with his Jordanian wife, Lana Abdel Salam Jarrar.


But after undergoing surgery for a varicose vein in a testicle in August 1994, he was drugged by Sudanese security police and delivered to French agents who bundled him into a sack and flew him to Paris.