'The Jackal' loses bid to sue writer
Copyright 1998 Nando.net
Copyright 1998 Reuters
PARIS (January 21, 1998 6:55 p.m. EST http://www.nando.net) - A court on
Wednesday denied a plea by guerrilla mastermind Carlos the Jackal for
damages from a writer he accused of undermining his presumption of
innocence in connection with a Paris bombing.
Carlos, whose real name is Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, had asked the Paris
civil law court for $89,500 in damages from French author and journalist
Bernard Violet.
Carlos's lawyer Frederic Pariente told the court during a Dec. 4 hearing
that Violet, in his book "Carlos, International Terrorism's Secret
Networks," assumed that Carlos was behind a 1974 bomb explosion which
killed two people at the fashionable Drugstore St Germain in Paris.
Lawyers for Violet, calling the suit "procedural terrorism," argued that
Carlos had boasted of the bombing in a 1979 interview published in the
daily al-Watan al-Arabi. Carlos has since denied giving the interview.
The Paris court concluded that the book contained only factual
information and ordered Carlos to pay legal costs.
A Paris criminal court jailed Carlos for life last December for the 1975
murder of two unarmed French secret agents and their Lebanese informer.
After blazing a trail of terror through Europe and the Middle East in
the 1970s and 1980s, Carlos has been in custody in France since he was
spirited into the country from Sudan by French secret agents in 1994.
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