bin Laden is dead and gone, but Carlos rambles on. |
Recently, Carlos the Jackal resurfaced again as his French captors made him stand trial for another terrorist incident in France from long ago. He isn't so young anymore, but he displayed some of the panache that made him the world's most famous terrorist--which he ironically is once more after the killing of bin Laden--wearing a Russian ushanka hat with the flaps tied up while appearing in court late last year. (He didn't get expelled from the Soviet-era Patrice Lumumba Friendship University for nothing.) Now, he's back:
An investigating judge specialising in anti-terror cases had ordered the latest prosecution, French newspaper Le Figaro reported on Tuesday. Ramirez, 64, had admitted carrying out the 15 September 1974 attack on the Drugstore Saint-Germain in an Algerian newspaper five years later, French media said. He has already been given a life sentence for killing 11 people and wounding another 150 in four attacks dating back to the early 1980s:bin Laden's successors at the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) are even more pointlessly bloodthirsty than he ever was. Carlos the Jackal was from a different age when targets were more Western ones and socialist fervor was more the cause. That is, the "international workingman" was a broad church where people of different ethnicities could work against bourgeois oppressors. With the fundamentalists, it's simplified into a "you're either with or against us," Muslims against infidels struggle.Ramirez has also been linked to several other attacks outside France.
- In March 1982, a bomb exploded on a train between Paris and Toulouse, killing five people and wounding 28
- A month later a car bomb attack was mounted on an anti-Syrian newspaper in Paris, with one passer-by killed and 60 injured
- On New Year's Eve 1983, a bomb on a TGV fast train between Marseille and Paris killed three people and wounded 13
- A bomb at a Marseille train station killed two