Terrorism in Europe - Patrick Cockburn

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was kept in perfect running order.

      The Stasi helped not only Sanchez, but also arranged doctors' appointments for his then girlfriend, Magdalena Kopp, and her colleague, the West German terrorist Johannes Weinrich.

      East Germany's support for Sanchez was apparently far greater than the assistance given by the regime to West Germany's Red Army Faction. The terrorist group carried out a string of bombing, kidnappings and murders in 1970s and 80s. Its members were given safe houses in East Germany when they were on the run from the West German authorities. East Germany also had close links with Palestinian groups and Libya.

      From East Berlin, Sanchez is believed to have planned attacks on Radio Free Europe's office in Munich and a 1983 attack on West Berlin's Maison de France, a French cultural centre, which killed one man and injured 22 others. Bomb attacks on two French TGV trains which killed four and injured dozens followed in the same year. According to the files, Sanchez's close links with the Stasi enabled the secret police to put pressure on him to refrain from carrying out terrorist attacks at sensitive moments. When the former Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev visited West Germany in November 1981, the files show that the KGB submitted a request to the Stasi to intervene to "prevent any activities" by Sanchez during the visit. The request apparently worked, because, although western intelligence was aware that the group was planning an imminent West German attack, the visit passed off without incident.

      The revelations about Sanchez have emerged from some 15,500 rubbish sacks stuffed with torn or shredded secret police files that Stasi officers frantically tried to destroy in the aftermath of the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. The sacks were meant to be taken to rubbish dumps and burned, but protesters occupied East Berlin's Stasi headquarters and prevented their removal.

      However it was not until 1995 that reunited Germany began attempting to reconstitute the damaged files using archivists to do the painstaking work by hand. Two years ago staff at the government office which oversees the files reported that they had managed to put together 900,000 Stasi file pages from 400 of the sacks. The contents have helped further to expose the iniquities of a secret police system in a state in which around every fourth citizen was an informer. A computer is now being used in a pilot study designed to rebuild the files electronically.

      French and US intelligence eventually persuaded the authorities in Sudan, where Sanchez eventually lived, to arrest him. He was captured and tranquilised by his own bodyguards after undergoing a minor operation on a testicle in 1994. He was then handed to French intelligence agents and flown to Paris to stand trial.

      In 1997 he was sentenced to life imprisonment after being convicted of the 1975 murder of two French policemen and a former PFLP guerrilla-turned-informant. Sanchez, who married his trial lawyer Isabelle Coutant-Peyre in jail in 2001, has published a collection of his writings from prison in which he expresses his support for Osama bin Laden and heaps praise on Saddam Hussein, calling him the "last Arabic knight".

      Tony Paterson

      Monday, 13 May 2013

      The 1970s “celebrity terrorist” Ilich Ramirez Sanchez – better known as “Carlos the Jackal” – complained on Monday that the Venezuelan government was trying to sabotage his appeal against life imprisonment in France.

      Sanchez, 63, had counted on the late Venezuelan president, Hugo Chavez, to finance his six weeks long appeal hearing which has begun in Paris. He told the court that he had no money and he had been forced to order his large defence team to stay at home.

      Sanchez, the symbol of a “cool but cruel” middle class international terrorism in the 1970s and 1980s, has been in jail in France since he was kidnapped by French agents in Sudan in 1994. He was convicted in 1997 of killing two French policemen and an informer. He was given a second life sentence in 2011 for organising four terrorist attacks in France in the early 1980s in which 11 people died.

      On the first day of his appeal hearing on Monday, he asked the court to appoint “duty lawyers” at the expense of the French taxpayer. “They won’t know the arguments but I know them well,” he said. “It won’t help my defence but we will muddle along.”

      After a brief adjournment, the court accepted his request. Sanchez nodded and said: “A blonde and a brunette, please”.

      In 2001 he “married” one of his French lawyers Isabelle Coutant-Peyre, in an Islamic ceremony which has no status under French law. Ms Coutant-Peyre complained on Monday that the new government in Venezuela was taking an obstructive approach since President Chavez – a publicly declared Jackal admirer – had died in March.

      From the early 1970s, Sanchez, the son of wealthy, left-wing Venezuelan family, became the symbol of rootless, middle class terrorism, allied to the Palestinian cause and allegedly sponsored by the Soviet Union.

      John Lichfield

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      Saturday, 25 October 2008

      Iraqi secret police believed that the notorious Palestinian assassin Abu Nidal was working for the Americans as well as Egypt and Kuwait when they interrogated him in Baghdad only months before the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq. Hitherto secret documents which are now in the hands of the Independent - written by Saddam Hussein's brutal security services for Saddam's eyes only - state that he had been "colluding" with the Americans and, with the help of the Egyptians and Kuwaitis, was trying to find evidence linking Saddam and al-Qa'ida.

      President George Bush was to use claims of a relationship with al-Qa'ida as one of the reasons for his 2003 invasion, along with Iraq's possession of weapons of mass destruction. Western reports were to dismiss Iraq's claim that Abu Nidal committed suicide in August 2002, suggesting that Saddam's own security services murdered him when his presence became an embarrassment for them. The secret papers from Iraq suggest that he did indeed kill himself after confessing to the "treacherous crime of spying against this righteous country".

      The final hours of Abu Nidal, the mercenary whose assassinations and murderous attacks in 20 countries over more than a quarter of a century killed or wounded more than 900 civilians, are revealed in the set of intelligence reports drawn up for Saddam's "presidency intelligence office" in September of 2002. The documents state that Egyptian and Kuwaiti intelligence officers had asked Abu Nidal, whose real name was Khalil al-Banna, to spy for them "with the knowledge of their American counterparts". Five days after his death, Iraq's head of intelligence, Taher Jalil Habbush, told a press conference in Baghdad that Abu Nidal had committed suicide after Iraqi agents arrived at the apartment where he was hiding in the city, but the secret reports make it clear that the notorious Palestinian had undergone a long series of interrogations prior to his violent demise. The records of these sessions were never intended to be made public and were written by Iraqi "Special Intelligence Unit M4" for Saddam. While Abu Nidal may have lied to his interrogators - torture is not mentioned in the reports - the documents appear to be a frank internal account of what the Iraqis believed his mission in Iraq to be. The papers name a Kuwaiti major, a member of the ruling Kuwaiti al-Sabbah family, as his "handler" and state that he was also tasked to "perform terrorist acts inside and outside Iraq". His presence in the country "would provide the Americans with the pretext that Iraq was harbouring terrorist organisations," the reports say.

      "Coded messages indicate that the Kuwaitis asked him indirectly to find out whether al-Qa'ida elements were present in Iraq. Our conclusions were confirmed when he [Abu Nidal] started to mitigate his actions with irrational answers when asked about the data against him. He attempted to sidetrack his answers by not being specific and referring to historical matters. It was noted by the investigators that he went from short, ambiguous and unclear replies to generalities, he seemed perturbed. But once he became convinced of the weight of the evidence against him concerning his collusion with both the American and Kuwaiti intelligence apparatuses in coordination with Egyptian intelligence, he realised that his treacherous crime of spying against this righteous country had been

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