Carlos the Jackal back in court to appeal French bombing conviction

Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, the Venezuelan better known to the world as Carlos the Jackal, returns to court on Monday to appeal his conviction for a series of deadly bombings in France 30 years ago.

The 63-year-old, who has been imprisoned in France since being captured in Sudan in 1994, was found guilty in 2011 of masterminding the 1982 and 1983 attacks on two French passenger trains, a train station in Marseille and a Libyan magazine office in Paris.

Already serving life for murder at the time, Carlos was given another life sentence for his role in attacks that left 11 people dead and nearly 150 injured, earning him the mantle of the world’s most wanted fugitive.

The 1982-83 bombings in France were widely believed to have been carried out in retaliation for France’s detention of two fellow members of a militant group Carlos ran with the support of East Germany’s notorious secret police, the Stasi.

But prosecutors in France were struggling to secure the evidence they needed to secure a conviction until the release of secret Stasi files in the years that followed the collapse of communism and German reunification.

At the heart of Carlos’s appeal will be a claim that the evidence garnered from these files is fundamentally unreliable.