French militant Carlos the Jackal opens appeal against life sentence

PARIS, September 22 : Reuters -- Carlos the Jackal, the militant with left hands who carried out multiple attacks across the globe in the 1970 s and 1980 s, opened a bid in a French court on Wednesday to reduce the life sentence he had been given for a deadly grenade attack on a Paris shop in 1974.

The self-declared professional revolutionary whose real name is Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, has been behind bars in France since he was captured and sent by French special forces out of Sudan in 1994.

He was found guilty of a bomb attack in 2017 on a shop on Paris' Champs Elysees, the Drugstore Publicis, which involved two people and injured 36.

The appeal initiated on Wednesday will not seek to overturn that conviction but will only concern how many years he should be jailed for, after the country's top court struck down the latest ruling over technicalities and sent it back to the lower court.

The decision will be expected later on Friday.

Ramirez, born in Venezuela and is now 71, is already serving two more life terms and has lost appeals against them.

One is for the murder of two French police officers and an informant in June 1975 and the other for attacks on trains, a line and a Paris street in 1982 and 1983 that killed 11 people and wounded about 150 others.

In the 1970 s and 1980 s, Marxist militant became the preferred enemy number one for Western governments and the most so-called public man.

He sealed his international reputation by taking OPEC oil ministers hostage in the name of the Palestinian struggle in an attack on its Vienna headquarters in 1975 in which three people were murdered and three terrorized.

The nickname was given to him by the media after a reporter saw a copy of Frederick Forsyth's The Day of the Jackal at Ramirez's London flat.