Washington Post, 26 Jan 10: Long before Osama bin Laden, Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, a.k.a. Carlos the Jackal, was the most famous terrorist of his era, bursting onto the scene with a spectacular hostage-taking of 11 OPEC oil ministers in 1975 and feeding his fame with more bloody attacks in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Ramírez, described by the spy novelist Robert Ludlum as “the most dangerous man of all times,” has been the subject of numerous books and films over the past two decades, not all of them flattering. But apparently determined to control his image even from his Paris prison cell, he has brought suit against a French production company shooting a documentary film on his life and legend, demanding a say on the final cut. . . .

. . . .The Venezuelan-born Ramírez, now 60, was brought to justice after French police, acting on a U.S. tip, captured him in 1994 as he recovered from surgery in Khartoum, the Sudanese capital. Bundled into a French government jet and secretly flown to Paris, he has been incarcerated ever since. Before his return, he had been sentenced in absentia to life in prison for the killings of two French internal security agents and their informant after they knocked on the door of his Paris hideout in 1975. A Paris appeals court ruled 16 months ago that he must also stand trial before a special anti-terrorism tribunal for a series of spectacular terrorism attacks in Paris in 1982 and 1983.

Ramírez carried out his attacks in the name of Palestinian liberation and against the established order. Although he has converted to Islam since his imprisonment, he fought for secular leftist ideals that are a far cry from the strict Salafist Islam that motivates al-Qaeda and most terrorism today. The son of a Communist-sympathizing Venezuelan lawyer, Ramírez was named after Lenin. In the early 1970s, he joined the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a radical group headed by George Habash that helped pioneer airline hijackings. As a member of the PFLP External Operations group, Ramírez and Palestinian accomplices kidnapped the OPEC ministers during a meeting in Vienna. Later that same year, according to French police, he tried to bring down an Israeli airliner by shooting a shoulder-fired rocket from the terrace of Orly Airport. . . .