Terror leader cleared of bombing attacks

A German court today acquitted a jailed aide of the terrorist Carlos the Jackal of murder in a deadly series of bombings in France in the early 1980s.

The Berlin state court cited lack of evidence in acquitting Johannes Weinrich, 56.

Weinrich once headed European operations for Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, the man known as Carlos. He is already serving a life sentence for a 1983 attack on a French cultural centre in then-West Berlin that killed one man.

In his second trial, which opened in March 2003, Weinrich was charged with six counts of murder and 22 counts of attempted murder.

He was accused of involvement in twin New Year’s Eve blasts at the main train station in Marseilles that killed five people in 1983 and a car bombing the previous year in Paris that killed a passer-by.

Prosecutors had sought a second life sentence.

Weinrich, who once topped Germany’s most-wanted list, was captured and extradited from Yemen in 1995.

Carlos, a Venezuelan, was arrested in Sudan in 1994 and handed over to France, where he is serving life for the 1975 murders of two French secret agents and an alleged informer.

The Berlin court failed to secure evidence from Carlos in Weinrich’s trial, and Weinrich himself also refused to testify.