‘I am innocent, I am guilty, or go screw yourself’
Theatrical antics have been a daily feature in the trial of Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, now in its fourth week.
Charged with four bloody bomb attacks in France in 1982 and 83 that killed 11 people and wounded nearly 200, the 62-year-old Venezuelan has cast himself as a revolutionary fighter with contacts in high places who has suffered “inhumane” conditions in a French prison since his capture nearly two decades ago.
Asked by a judge to clarify his position on the attacks, Ramirez responded, “There are three possibilities: I am innocent, I am guilty, or I’m saying, ‘Go screw yourself.’”
Three co-defendants are being judged in abstentia, with two of them fugitives and another in prison in Germany.
Interrupting judges, correcting lawyers and talking over speakers, Ramirez carries himself like an unfairly deposed head of state, rather than a convicted killer already serving life sentences for previous lethal attacks in France.
Yesterday, a former comrade in the witness stand described his former boss as a cold-blooded killer with no scruples, sending Ramirez into a rage.
Once the face of Marxist struggle and the Palestinian cause, Ramirez spent much of the 1970s and 80s launching anti-imperialist attacks around the world in operations funded by Soviet-bloc and Middle Eastern countries.
Ramirez, who sported a Che Guevara-style beret and cultivated a taste for Havana cigars, sealed his renown with a bloody hostage-taking in 1975 of OPEC oil ministers. His luck ran out in 1994 when French special forces captured him in Khartoum, bringing him to France to face trial.
He has scoffed at the current case against him that took 13 years to build — due, according to the former lead judge, to the painstaking process of culling dusty Eastern European secret service archives. His lawyers argue the case is fixed.
The trial is due to finish this month and a verdict delivered soon after.
