'I fell under spell of Carlos the Jackal'
http://archive.gulfnews.com/world/General/10152204.html
09/07/2007 11:30 PM | By Tony Paterson, The Telegraph Group Limited
Berlin: The first wife of Carlos the Jackal has lifted the lid on their
tempestuous relationship, claiming she was unable to resist him despite his
notoriety and the danger that came with it.
Magdalena Kopp spent 13 years as the lover and wife of one of the world's
then most wanted terrorists. Although he landed her in jail and nicknamed her
"the cow", she returned to him after her release from prison and even bore him
a child.
Now the 59-year-old German photographer has published her account of her
life with Illich Ramirez Sanchez, the real name of the Venezuela-born Leftist.
A Marxist-Leninist revolutionary turned professional killer, Sanchez
claimed responsibility for the deaths of more than 1,500 people in the cause of
Palestinian liberation before he was jailed for life in Paris in 1997, for
killing two police officers and an informant.
Kopp's book, The Terror Years, is a detailed account of her times with
the beguiling, seductive and fanatically violent Sanchez. The daughter of a
postman and a waitress from the southern town of Ulm, Kopp, like many of her
generation, fled the provinces for cities abroad in the early 1970s in an
attempt to escape a Germany held to be still tarnished by the Nazi era.
As a young and militant Left-wing photographer, she met Sanchez while
helping to install a darkroom in the London offices of the People's Front for
the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP).
Creepy conformist
She recalled how she had thought that Sanchez, with his "round, baby
face, parted short hair and suit and tie", looked like a "creepy conformist",
and claimed she found his initial sexual advances repellent.
Yet a year later, in 1976, she joined a group of German pro-Palestinian
Left-wing activists on a trip to a PFLP camp in southern Yemen, where Sanchez
was their host. Their relationship developed in earnest two years later when
she flew to Baghdad to join Sanchez, who was living as a guest of the Iraqi
secret service. "I fell under Carlos's spell and became totally dependent on
him," Kopp told The Sunday Telegraph from her home in Ulm last week. "When you
are alone with someone like that, you get seduced and simply obey. He had a way
of making women feel they were the other half of the coming revolution."
By that stage Sanchez was already being called "the Jackal" by the
international media for his cold-blooded assassination of four French secret
policemen in a Paris flat. Yet Kopp said she was unable to resist his advances.
"Carlos simply took me. He laid his pistol next to me on the bedside
table and slept with me. It was a sexual act without any emotion, practically a
rape. It was always like that."
They moved between places of sanctuary throughout the Middle East and
communist eastern Europe. His pet name for her was "the cow".
She said: "Once he bought me a birthday cake with 'For my cow' written in
icing on the top. Now I would throw something like that in his face, but then I
said nothing."
In 1982 Kopp was arrested in France and jailed for four years after
taking part in an attempted bomb attack. Sanchez launched his own terror
campaign to secure her release. Almost as soon as her sentence had been served,
Kopp rejoined her lover, partially out of fear, she claimed.
"He rang me up one night and that was it. I went to him in Damascus. He
would have come and taken me if I hadn't," she said.
Stolen limousines
In Syria, Kopp renounced terrorism and the couple married. She gave birth
to their daughter, Rosa, in 1986. By that time, Sanchez was making a living by
dealing in stolen limousines. The couple were expelled from Syria at the end of
the 1980s and with the collapse of communism, their backing in eastern Europe
withered.
"We were forced on the odyssey through Arab countries and none of them
would take us in," she said.
Kopp fled with her daughter to Venezuela where she lived briefly with
Sanchez's family. He was arrested in Sudan in 1994 and extradited to France.
Kopp has not seen him since. The terrorist, jailed for life in 1997,
divorced her and married his French lawyer. Kopp returned to Ulm in 1995, where
she now helps immigrant children with learning difficulties. Her daughter has
just turned 21. Sanchez, now 57, sent her a birthday card from prison.
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