PARIS — The man known as ‘‘Carlos the Jackal,’’ once the world’s most-wanted fugitive, appeared in a French court Monday to face charges in connection with a deadly 1974 attack on a Paris shopping arcade.
Families of the victims have awaited for decades for Venezuelan-born Ilich Ramirez Sanchez to be put on trial.
He is accused of throwing a hand grenade from a mezzanine restaurant onto a shopping area in the French capital’s Latin Quarter. Two people were killed and 34 injured at the trendy Drugstore Publicis.
The 67-year-old is already serving a life sentence in France for a series of murders and attacks he was convicted of perpetrating or organizing in the country, on behalf of the Palestinian cause or the communist revolution in the 1970s and ’80s.
As the trial opened Monday, he denounced it as a ‘‘gross manipulation of justice’’ 42 years after the attack. He has denied involvement and pleaded innocent.
The back and forth between him and a panel of judges provided some answers not usually heard from a criminal suspect asserting innocence.
Asked to state his profession, Ramirez Sanchez called himself a ‘‘professional revolutionary,’’ and said ‘‘I’m doing fine’’ in prison — after more than 20 years behind bars.
At one point, the presiding judge asked him whether he had any regrets.
‘‘Yes, I have regrets — because I’m kindhearted — that I did not kill people I should have killed,’’ Ramirez Sanchez answered. ‘‘I like people. I know what violence is. I don’t like violence.’’
If convicted at the end of the new trial before a special terrorism court, he could get a third life sentence.
Ramirez Sanchez, who was convicted of terrorism in 2011, is charged this time with multiple first-degree murders in relation with a terrorist enterprise.
At the time of the 1974 attack, he was 24 years old and already had joined the organization Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, but hadn’t yet achieved worldwide notoriety.
When police arrived at the scene of the attack, they found a devastated mall with all the windows shattered, multiple bloodstains, and a hole in the marble slab of the ground floor where the grenade fell.
The two men who died were hit by metal chips that perforated vital organs and caused internal bleeding, according to court documents.
His longtime lawyer, Isabelle Coutant-Peyre, contends that none of the witnesses had described a man resembling her client, and that the whole case was trumped up.
The case took so long to go to trial because it was first dismissed for lack of evidence before being reopened when Ramirez Sanchez was arrested and imprisoned in France.
