The new trial, scheduled for November 2019 by the Court of Cassation, will continue until Friday. The hearings will be aimed only at analyzing the term of punishment, since the defendant’s guilt has already been firmly established by the courts. The previous sentence was life imprisonment.
The 71-year-old defendant, who has been imprisoned in France since his arrest in Sudan in 1994, entered the court with a smile. “I’ve been on forced leave for 27 and a half years,” he told the president of the court when he was forced to show his identity card.
In March 2017, Jackal Carlos was sentenced to life imprisonment, the sentence upheld in court of appeal for throwing a grenade at the Publicis Pharmacy in Paris on Boulevard Saint-Germain in 1974. Two dead and 34 wounded. …
The Court of Cassation partially overturned the second verdict, which found the Venezuelan guilty of murder and attempted murder for “explosive force” and for transporting “an explosive device without a valid reason.”
This court, the main judicial authority in France, considered that the transport of the grenade was “a necessary preliminary operation for the commission of other crimes” and calculated that Carlos had been convicted twice for the same crime.
A defendant in the “anti-imperialist” armed struggle of the 1970s and 1980s, the Venezuelan was twice sentenced to life imprisonment: for three murders in 1975 in Paris and for four explosions in France in 1982 and 1983 (11 dead and 191 injured). …
