On August 14, 1994, the terrorist Ilyich Ramirez Sanchez, known as “Carlos the Jackal”, was captured. He received the pseudonym Carlos after becoming a member of the left-wing extremist organization Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and the nickname ”Jackal” was given to him by the press when the book ”The Day of the Jackal” by Frederick Forsyth was discovered among his belongings.
For years, Carlos the Jackal built his infamous reputation with murders, bombs and extortion, and each time he managed to escape unhindered both because of his influential supporters and because of gross errors in the tactics of the secret services. He was arrested during an operation by French special forces in Sudan, commanded by the famous anti-terrorist judge Jean-Louis Brugier.
Carlos the Jackal is one of the most famous terrorists of the 1970s and 1980s.
Today he is serving a life sentence in France for the murder of two secret agents and a Lebanese informant.
Ilich Ramirez Sanchez was born in Caracas, Venezuela, in 1949. A curious fact in his biography is that his father was a staunch communist and in honor of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, he named his sons after him - Carlos' other brothers were named Vladimir and Lenin, respectively.
After graduating from high school, Ilich Ramirez Sanchez received a scholarship through the USSR Embassy in Caracas. He went to the Soviet Union to study at the Patrice Lumumba Peoples' Friendship University, which was used by the KGB to "recruit foreign communists."
In the early 1970s, he joined the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) in Jordan and participated in the fighting during Black September. In 1973, he made an unsuccessful attempt to assassinate the Jewish businessman and vice president of the British Zionist Federation, Joseph Zieff. These actions were in response to the assassination of Mohamed Badia, the PFLP's leader for Europe in Paris, by Mossad agents. Carlos Chacala himself admitted responsibility for a bombing at the Hapoalim Bank in London, for three car bombs planted in front of newspaper offices in France, and for a grenade attack in a Paris restaurant that killed two and injured 30.
In The Hague on June 27, 1974, he assisted the Japanese United Red Army in an operation to kidnap the French ambassador. On January 13 and 17, 1975, he participated in two unsuccessful attempts to blow up El Al planes with a grenade launcher at Orly Airport, Paris. On June 27, 1975, Carlos Chacala shot two French agents while trying to arrest him after he was betrayed by Michel Mukharbal, an arrested member of the PFLP. Mukharbal was also shot. Carlos fled to Lebanon, where he converted to Islam.