A last trial, only to fix the length of his sentence: 47 years after the murderous attack on the Drugstore Publicis, Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, said Carlos, is retried from Wednesday in Paris for this attack which earned him two sentences at the perpetuity.
This new trial, ordered in November 2019 by the Court of Cassation, must last three days and relates only to the quantum of the sentence, since the guilt of the Venezuelan in the attack which left two dead and 34 wounded in 1974 had been recognized. definitely by justice.
The terrorist has been imprisoned in France since his arrest in 1994, in Sudan.
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Figure of the “
anti-imperialist
”
terrorism
of the years 1970-80, Carlos was sentenced in March 2017 to life imprisonment for having thrown a grenade in the shopping arcade of the Parisian department store, a sentence confirmed a year later on appeal . But the Court of Cassation had partially quashed the judgment of the Assize Court, which had declared Carlos guilty of assassinations and attempted assassinations by "
the effect of an explosive power
", but also of transporting a grenade "
without a legitimate reason
".
This transport being "
a preliminary operation necessary for the commission of other offenses
", the highest judicial court considered that Carlos had been convicted twice for the same thing.
The
self-proclaimed “
professional revolutionary
”, now 71 years old, is therefore facing a special assize court, in charge of terrorist crimes, for the third time in this case.
Carlos has already been sentenced twice to the maximum penalty by French justice, for a triple murder in 1975 in Paris and for four bombings committed in France in 1982 and 1983 (11 dead and 191 injured).
An attack to free a Japanese revolutionary
The Drugstore attack took place on September 15, 1974 in Paris, around 5:10 p.m.: a grenade thrown by a man from the mezzanine restaurant had exploded in the shopping arcade below, at the corner of Boulevard Saint-Germain and Rennes street.
For the prosecution, this attack was aimed at facilitating the release of a Japanese arrested in Orly, a member of the Japanese Red Army (ARJ) whose commando had also just demanded the release during a hostage-taking. at the French Embassy in The Hague. This movement was close to a branch of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), of which Carlos had become one of the armed groups in Europe. The grenade thrown at the Drugstore was, according to this hypothesis, the pressure tactic chosen by Carlos to accelerate the release of the Japanese revolutionary. Without DNA or confession, Carlos had been convicted on the basis of a body of evidence, including the testimony of a former comrade in arms, Hans Joachim Klein.
According to the investigation, the grenade used at the Drugstore came from the same batch stolen from an American base in Germany as those found in a mistress of Carlos and those abandoned after the hostage-taking in The Hague.
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“
A trial just to fix the sentence is not serious. Either we go to trial, or we do nothing,
”said Carlos' lawyer, Isabelle Coutant Peyre - who had become his partner in detention - also criticizing the“
unreasonable delays
”of the procedure. “
Everything is open,
” she nevertheless considered. The Venezuelan himself claimed responsibility for this action in an interview published at the end of 1979 in the magazine El-Watan Al-Arabi, an interview that the person then claimed to have never given. At his appeal trial in March 2018, the "
Jackal
" had willingly given himself up to the story of his years on the run and his political commitment, explaining that violence had "
imposed itself.
To him, while reluctant to acknowledge the crimes for which he was convicted.