Carlos the Jackal: The Assassin Who Became a Celebrity
Updated: Aug 14
For about two decades, a man born Ilich Ramirez Sanchez shot businessmen, bombed department stores and train cars, and took dozens of oil ministers hostage in one of the boldest raids of the Cold War, all in the name of Marxist revolution and Palestinian liberation. He picked up the nickname Carlos the Jackal along the way, and somewhere in the process of doing all that damage, he also became genuinely famous, the kind of infamous that gets you a Golden Globe winning miniseries and, in 2025, a brand new documentary built entirely around interviews he gave from inside a French prison cell. Nearly thirty years after his capture, he still isn't sorry, and that's most of what makes his story worth digging into properly.
A Marxist Lawyer's Son
Ilich Ramirez Sanchez was born in Caracas, Venezuela in 1949, named after Vladimir Ilyich Lenin by a father who was a wealthy Marxist lawyer. He grew up comfortably, attended a private school with a bohemian streak, and joined its Communist youth branch as a teenager despite being, by most accounts, timid, overweight and unpopular with his classmates. In the late 1960s he studied at Moscow's Patrice Lumumba University, a school built partly to train sympathetic foreign students, where the KGB actually looked into recruiting him and turned him down, citing his poor academic record and his taste for the high life over any real ideological discipline. He later claimed to a family friend that he'd been in the Middle East learning how to kill people considered enemies of the Palestinian cause, yet accounts from the period describe him spending far more time in London nightclubs like The Playboy and Churchill's than in any radical political circles.
His First Shooting Went Wrong
His debut as an actual gunman came on December 30, 1973, at 48 Queens Grove in St John's Wood, London, the home of Joseph Sieff, chairman of Marks and Spencer. Carlos forced the butler upstairs at the point of a 9mm Beretta while Sieff's wife watched from the bedroom and called the police. He shot Sieff in the face from about three feet away in the bathroom, but the bullet struck Sieff's dentures and knocked him unconscious rather than killing him. When Carlos tried to fire again, the gun jammed. Police arrived within two minutes of the call, and he fled, reportedly taking refuge in a nearby embassy building. Because he lived quietly with his mother and traveled in an unremarkable family car, investigators didn't identify him as the shooter for more than two years.
The Paris Bombings and a Growing Body Count
Through 1974, Carlos escalated from a botched shooting to coordinated bombings across Paris, targeting newspapers and commercial buildings tied to what he considered pro-Israeli or anti-Palestinian interests. The worst of these came that September, when a hand grenade thrown into the Drugstore Publicis, a fashionable Paris shopping arcade, killed two people and injured 34 more. It took French prosecutors more than four decades to actually convict him for that specific attack, in a 2017 trial where he denied involvement and received his third life sentence. The mid 1970s were a genuinely dangerous time for bombings across Western Europe more broadly. Around this same period, the Price sisters were carrying out the IRA's own bombing campaign against London's Old Bailey, a reminder that Carlos wasn't operating in isolation so much as inside a decade when political violence had become a genuinely common tool across the continent.
Sixty Hostages and a Private Jet
Carlos's most famous single operation came on December 21, 1975, when he led a six person commando team into the OPEC headquarters in Vienna during a meeting of the organization's oil ministers. The operation was actually planned by Wadie Haddad, the PFLP leader who'd recruited Carlos in the first place, and Carlos was under direct orders to kill the Saudi and Iranian oil ministers as part of the raid. He didn't. The raid still killed an Austrian police officer, an Iraqi OPEC employee and a Libyan delegate, and took more than 60 hostages.
Carlos demanded that a lengthy political communique be broadcast on Austrian radio and television every two hours, and the Austrian government eventually gave the group a plane, which flew 42 remaining hostages first to Algiers and then on to Tripoli. Exactly what happened with the ransom money remains murky, but some accounts put the total paid out for the release of the Arab hostages at somewhere between 20 and 50 million dollars, most of which Carlos reportedly kept for himself rather than passing it along to Haddad's organization. Haddad was furious, reportedly telling associates afterward that stars were very bad at following instructions and that there was no room for stars in his operational teams. It marked the beginning of the end of their partnership. It's the kind of hostage standoff that plays out again and again across this era. A decade later, French police officer Robert Broussard would face down a very different but similarly tense situation at the Nantes courthouse hostage crisis, a reminder of just how often live hostage negotiations played out on European soil during these decades.
Guns for Hire in East Berlin
After Haddad died in 1978, likely assassinated by Israeli intelligence, Carlos formed his own outfit, the Organization of Arab Armed Struggle, and effectively went into business as a mercenary, taking contracts from whichever Arab or Eastern Bloc government was willing to pay and protect him rather than answering to any single movement. That protection turned out to be remarkable. Files recovered from East Germany's Stasi archives after reunification show that Communist East Berlin gave Carlos a full headquarters staffed with 75 support personnel and let him walk the streets openly with an automatic pistol on his belt, treatment usually reserved for a government's own security services rather than a wanted foreign terrorist.
A Wife in Prison and a Bombing Campaign to Free Her
In January 1979, Carlos married Magdalena Kopp, a German woman who'd become involved with his network in the late 1970s. Kopp was arrested in Paris in February 1982 after a failed attack on a French nuclear facility, and Carlos responded with a deliberate, sustained bombing campaign meant to force her release. He bombed the French Cultural Centre in Beirut that March, then a French passenger train later the same month that was reportedly meant to be carrying former President Jacques Chirac, killing five people and injuring around 30 more. Further train bombings followed into 1983. Kopp was eventually released in May 1985 after earning credit for good behavior, and the couple reunited in Hungary before relocating to Syria, where their daughter, Elba Rosa, was born that August.
Capture in Sudan
By the early 1990s Carlos had worn out his welcome across most of the Middle East, and by 1994 he was living in Khartoum, Sudan, reportedly protected by the government of Sheikh Hassan al-Turabi. French intelligence spent months negotiating with Sudanese officials, and on August 14, 1994, agents captured him while he was undergoing medical treatment. Because France had no extradition treaty with Sudan, they didn't wait for one. According to NPR's later reporting on his case, French agents sedated him under anesthesia, tied him up, put him in a canvas bag, and flew him directly to Paris with no formal legal process at all. Sudan's government later claimed credit for cooperating with the operation and used it to lobby for its own removal from the United States' list of state sponsors of terrorism.
Three Life Sentences
Carlos was tried and convicted in France three separate times. The first came in December 1997, for the 1975 murders of two French intelligence agents and an informant named Michel Moukharbal, earning him a life sentence without the possibility of parole. The second came in December 2011, when he was convicted over a string of bombings across France in the 1980s that killed 11 people and injured roughly 150, adding a second life sentence. The third and most recent came in March 2017, when the Drugstore Publicis grenade attack from 1974 finally caught up with him, adding a third life sentence more than 40 years after the fact.
Two More Wives and a Marriage From Prison
Carlos's personal life stayed nearly as complicated as his operational one. After leaving Jordan in 1991, he left Magdalena Kopp for a younger Jordanian woman, Lana Jarrar, who became his second wife, while Kopp returned to Venezuela with their daughter to live with Carlos's mother. Then, in 2001, while still legally married to Jarrar, Carlos converted to Islam in prison and married his own defense lawyer, Isabelle Coutant-Peyre, in a religious ceremony. She has continued representing him in court and publicly campaigning for his release for more than two decades since.
Still Talking, Still Unrepentant
Carlos remains in French prison today, serving all three of his life sentences at once. In 2025, filmmakers Yaron Niski and Danny Liber secured a rare series of prison interviews with him for a documentary called The Jackal Speaks, which aired on BBC Four's Storyville strand that June after first being made for Israeli television. Reviewers who've seen it describe him as grandiose and entirely unrepentant, still framing his decades of killing as legitimate warfare rather than terrorism, and still displaying what one review called a disturbing blend of pride and detachment when he talks through his old operations. The film also revisits his threat, during the campaign to free Kopp, to blow up nuclear power stations in France if she wasn't released, a detail that captures just how far he was willing to go for the people closest to him. It's a strange kind of legacy for a man whose actual reputation, according to several historians who've studied his career closely, always ran well ahead of what he really accomplished. The myth of Carlos the Jackal did as much work for him as any bomb or bullet ever did.
Quick Answers
Who is Carlos the Jackal? Carlos the Jackal is the nickname for Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, a Venezuelan born militant who carried out shootings, bombings and the 1975 OPEC hostage crisis across Europe and the Middle East in the name of Palestinian liberation and Marxist revolution. He's been in French prison since his 1994 capture in Sudan.
Is Carlos the Jackal still alive? Yes. As of 2026 he remains in French prison serving three separate life sentences, and he gave a series of interviews from behind bars for the BBC documentary The Jackal Speaks.
