Carlos the Jackal challenges train blasts conviction

The terrorist known as Carlos the Jackal was in a Paris court today to try to overturn his conviction for four bombings in France.

Appearing under his real name Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, 63, he is already serving a life sentence for the 1975 murders of two French policemen and an alleged police informer.

He was handed a second life sentence two years ago for his role in four bombings — of a Paris-Toulouse train and the office of Arabic newspaper al-Watan in 1982, and two train bombings in 1983.

The trial heard how Sanchez left 11 people dead and 150 injured in the bombings as he waged a “private war” against France to obtain the release of two jailed members of his gang.

His appeal against the 1982-83 bombing convictions claims evidence used against him from East German Stasi secret police files was unreliable.

Sanchez has persistently denied any links to the bombings but he has admitted killing 200 innocent civilians during his 20-year campaign as a self-professed “freedom fighter” for the Palestinian cause.

In an interview with Venezualan newspaper El Nacional in 2011 he said he was “proud of the results” of more than 100 terror attacks. Asked about civilians who lost their lives among 2,000 he claims to have killed, he said: “There were very few. I calculated that they were fewer than 10 per cent.

In 1975 Venezuelan-born Sanchez took 11 Opec ministers hostage in Vienna. He took a DC-9 plane supplied by Austrian authorities to fly towards Algeria with his hostages. After nearly two decades on the run, he was captured in Khartoum in 1994 by French secret service agents.