http://www.vheadlin <http://www.vheadline.com/readnews.asp?id=74707>
e.com/readnews.asp?id=74707
Published: Monday, July 16, 2007
Bylined to: John Follain

Venezuelan Vladimir Ilich Ramirez Sanchez in first newspaper interview

Sunday Times UK (John Follain): 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,
criticizing them for plotting to kill ordinary people. 

In his first telephone interview with a newspaper, the Venezuelan-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 masochist -- 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 $20 million in ransom. He
eluded the CIA and French intelligence with the help of Colonel
Muammar Gadaffi, the Libyan leader, Saddam Hussein 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 organized. 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.

* His first attempt failed when Joseph Edward Sieff, the president
of Marks & Spencer, was shot at his home in St John's Wood in 1973,
but survived. 

In 1975, Sanchez shot dead two unarmed counter-intelligence officers
and an informer near the Sorbonne. When a journalist found a copy of
Frederick Forsyth's thriller The Day of the Jackal at his flat in
Bayswater, west London, the nickname "Carlos the Jackal" followed.

To Sanchez' irritation, it has stuck. He did not object to being
called a terrorist but "Jackal" irked him because it was the nickname
of an unpopular police chief in Venezuela. "It was invented by the
Guardian. It was my newspaper -- I used to buy it every day," he said.

In 1982, Carlos launched what French prosecutors call "a private war"
when his then-girlfriend, Magdalena Kopp, and an accomplice were
arrested in Paris with a car full of explosives. He is accused of
blowing up two trains, Marseilles railway station and a Paris street
to secure Kopp's freedom. She married Sanchez and had a daughter.

He dismissed his coming trial as "bull****," arguing that the
French had no right to prosecute him because he had been illegally
detained in Sudan in 1994 and brought to France. "I am being held
hostage," he claimed. 

Asked about his victims, he said: "I don't know how many I've killed
... I've been fighting since I was 14. Fighting, fighting. Do you know
how many people got killed in these fights?"

The French say the number was 83 but he said: "I couldn't count. Less
than 100 anyway." And what had those deaths achieved? "Our example has
been followed, not only by communists but even by jihadists."

In 1991 he settled in Amman but sent his wife and daughter to live in
Venezuela. "There were too many temptations -- pretty girls and
married women," he said. He later married Lana Jarrar, a Jordanian 19
years his junior.

Since his arrest he has been married again, this time to his lawyer,
Isabelle Coutant-Peyre.

"I think things are more difficult for her than for me, but this is
the price to pay for one's struggle against the empire," he said. 




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