Carlos the Jackal is the nickname of Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, a Venezuelan-born terrorist who went on an international killing spree from the 1970s through the 1990s.
Mr. Ramírez was born in Caracas in 1949 to Altagracia Ramírez, a wealthy Marxist lawyer who named his other two sons Vladimir and Lenin.
The Soviet Union expelled Mr. Ramírez as a troublemaker in 1970 while he was a student at Patrice Lumumba University in Moscow. He soon moved to Lebanon, where he fell in with pro-Palestinian radicals who were plotting terrorist attacks in Europe. He later allied himself with the Baader-Meinhof Gang, a German terrorist group also known as the Red Army Faction.
Mr. Ramírez is on trial in Paris for a series of bombings he is accused of orchestrating in the early 1980s. He is already serving a life sentence there for the killings of two French police agents and a Lebanese informer in 1975 — the same year in which he and a group of followers took several oil ministers hostage at an OPEC meeting in Vienna, killing a Libyan delegate, an Austrian police officer and an Iraqi bodyguard.
In 1992, France convicted Mr. Ramírez in absentia for the 1975 Paris killings. He spent a decade on the run across Eastern Europe and the Middle East, but in 1994, French secret service agents, acting on a tip from the C.I.A., seized him from a hospital bed in Sudan. He was wrapped in a burlap bag and spirited away to France, where he was re-tried in 1997 and given a life sentence.
In 2007, a French investigating judge ordered Mr. Ramírez and three others to stand trial for complicity in four bombings in 1982 and 1983 that left 11 people dead and wounded 195 others, but it was not until this year that a trial date was set.
The charges against Mr. Ramírez stem from a bombing in March 1982 of a Paris-Toulouse train in southwestern France; an attack in April 1982 on the Paris offices of an Arabic-language newspaper, Al Watan; and the bombing in December 1983 of a high-speed train and the main rail station in Marseille.
Prosecutors allege that those attacks were part of a personal war that Mr. Ramírez waged against the French authorities in an effort to secure the liberation of his girlfriend at the time, Magdalena Kopp, a German former revolutionary who had been imprisoned for an attempted bombing in 1982.
As evidence, prosecutors have cited an anonymous 1982 letter bearing Mr. Ramírez’s fingerprints that was addressed to France’s interior minister at the time, Gaston Defferre, demanding the release of Ms. Kopp and a Swiss accomplice. But Mr. Ramírez’s lawyers claim the letter does not exist. Ms. Kopp, who was married to Mr. Ramírez in Syria in 1985 and has a daughter with him, has since become a witness for the prosecution.
None of Mr. Ramírez’s three co-defendants is expected to appear at the trial, which is scheduled to run until Dec. 16. Johannes Weinrich, a 64-year-old German who once headed European operations for Mr. Ramírez, is already serving a life sentence in Germany for another bombing. Christa-Margot Fröhlich, 69, is a fugitive from a 2001 French arrest warrant, though she is believed to be living in Germany. The whereabouts of the third defendant, Ali Kamal al-Issawi, 70, are unknown
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