DAR AL HARB/ISLAM: CARLOS, THE JACKAL, LAUGHS AT AL QUEDA TERRORISTS

Carlos the Jackal sneers at Al-Qaeda’s ‘amateur’ killers
by John Follain, Paris

FOR two decades until his capture in 1994, Carlos the Jackal murdered, bombed and kidnapped his way to infamy, retaining the title of world’s most dangerous terrorist before Osama Bin Laden stole his crown.

But speaking from the Clair-vaux prison in northeast France last week he berated terrorist cells said to have targeted Britain, criticising them for plotting to kill ordinary people.

In his first telephone interview with a newspaper, the Venezue-lan-born Vladimir Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, 57, said he was saddened by any loss of life in London, where he lived as a young man. He also attacked what he called a lack of professionalism in some cells linked to Al-Qaeda.

Sanchez is serving a life sentence for three murders in Paris in 1975. He will go on trial again in January over four bomb attacks in France in 1982 and 1983 that killed 12 people and wounded more than 100.

Sanchez, who is now overweight and diabetic, showed no remorse, laughing when asked about the number of his victims.

“I’m not a sadist or a maso-chist – I don’t enjoy the suffering of others,” he claimed in a thick Latin American accent. “When we had to eliminate them it was in a cold, simple way with the least pain possible.”

His most audacious attack was the kidnapping of 11 oil ministers in Vienna in 1975, which elicited an estimated £10m in ransom. He eluded the CIA and French intelligence with the help of Colonel Muammar Gadaffi, the Libyan leader, Saddam Hus-sein in Iraq and a network of bases behind the Iron Curtain.

“Kensington and Chelsea were places where I spent my youth, so I’m not happy about people getting killed in the streets of London,” he said.

He condemned Al-Qaeda followers without specific targets, saying: “They are not professionals. They’re not organised. They don’t even know how to make proper explosives or proper detonators.”

Sanchez was a self-styled “professional revolutionary” who studied in Moscow in the 1960s before signing up with a Palestinian guerrilla movement. After being dispatched to London in the 1970s, he taught Spanish at a secretarial college in Mayfair, where he flirted with students while making lists of people to be kidnapped or murdered.

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Pertinent Links:

1) Carlos the Jackal sneers at Al-Qaeda’s ‘amateur’ killers