Carlos the Jackal goes on hunger strike
By LEON WATSON
Carlos the Jackal's health is deteriorating after he went on hunger strike over his treatment in France's most notorious prison.
The 62-year-old Venezuelan terrorist, whose murderous exploits shocked the world in the 70s and 80s, stopped eating a week ago.
Carlos, real name Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, is in solitary confinement at La Sante maximum security prison in Paris, where he is serving life for murder.
Infamous: Venezuelan Illich Ramirez Sanchez, better known as Carlos the Jackal, in the 1970s
He was put into isolation after using a prison phone to speak to journalists about a trial he is facing in November for a series of bomb attacks in the French capital which killed 11 people and maimed hundreds of others.
In a letter to the Ministry of Justice, Carlos's lawyer Francis Vuillemin said the strike was in response to 'the deliberate violation of my client's rights by the prison administration.'
Mr Vuillemin said a computer which Carlos had been able to use to prepare his defence case had been 'dismantled and thrown in pieces into a cardboard box, with no possibility of it being set up in his isolation cell.'
The lawyer said Carlos's personal belongings, including warm clothing, had been taken away, and that his client's health was rapidly deteriorating to the extent that he should sent to hospital.
Jailed: Carlos raises his fist as he appears in court in Paris in this November 28, 2000
High security: La Sante prison in Paris, where Carlos the Jackal has gone on hunger strike
In an emotional interview last month, Carlos said he was not sorry for any of his crimes, but did regret that his constant terrorist atrocities meant 'I couldn't bring up my children.'
Carlos, who was jailed in 1997 for the 1975 killing of two French policemen and a police informer, added: 'I sacrificed my family life. I was an absent husband most of the time.'
His principal French lawyer is Isabelle Coutant-Peyre, a Paris barrister who was so taken by the charismatic Marxist-Leninist, that she married him in La Sante in 2001.
Despite the new trial - and the fact that Carlos has admitted to murdering hundreds of people - she is convinced she can get him out of his 'filthy dungeon' and see him returned home to Venezuela as a pardoned political prisoner.
Carlos, who got his nickname from the Frederick Forsyth novel 'The Day of the Jackal', first made international headlines in 1975 when he led a commando raid on an OPEC oil cartel meeting in Vienna.
The raid led to three deaths, with Carlos then flying to Algeria with the dozens of hostages and ending up extracting a ransom in the region of 10 million pounds.
If he is well enough, his new trial will open in at the Palais de Justice in Paris on November 7th. He is pleading not guilty to all the charges.
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