Carlos the Jackal
Carlos the Jackal
So Carlos the Jackal has finally been jailed for life, with 18 years minimum before being considered for parole, which means that he is unlikely to get out alive because he’s 62 already.
He went down sobbing, for himself and for his paymaster and mentor, Muammar Gaddafi.
Carlos the Jackal is one of those names which haunted my childhood in the 1970s, that destitute decade when terrorism, bombings, kidnappings, hijackings and even cruise liner piracy became normal.
This was when the IRA, the Bader Meinhof and the Brigate Rosse dominated the news; when 16-year-old John Paul Getty was kidnapped in Rome in 1973 and his ear sent to his American oil mogul family with a demand for a mega-ransom.
It was when American publishing heiress Patty Hearst was kidnapped a year later by the Symbionese Liberation Army, suffered Stockholm Syndrome and joined her terrorist kidnappers; when the Italian prime minister Aldo Moro was kidnapped and killed four years later, the photograph of his corpse in a car-boot plasted all over the world news.
Patty Hearst, John Paul Getty, Aldo Moro, the Bader Meinhof, the Brigate Rosse, Carlos the Jackal – names that evoke the 1970s for me more vividly than any pair of bell-bottom jeans or cork-soled platform mules. The grown-ups would speak about him in ways that communicated his fearsome status as a mysterious monster. Carlos the Jackal. Nobody knew who he was, who he worked for.
Then we began to suspect that he worked for Gaddafi’s Libya, and it turned out that this was true.
We didn’t even know his real name or where he was from: Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, from Venezuela.
He was in his 20s when he bombed and murdered his way through the world news. Yesterday, he was an old man sobbing in the dock. Sic transit gloria mundi, if you can call it that.
How little satisfaction it must have given the relatives of his victims, who waited so long.
Read the story in the link below.
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http://www.timesofmalta.com/articles/view/20111217/world/Carlos-is-caged-again.398721
This man should have been executed in his 20s. It now gives me an eerie feeling that a 60-year old has to pay for the misdeeds of a 20-year old. They are not the same person. That is why he is sobbing. And that is why we don’t feel that the proper thing is being done.
It is a very eerie feeling, somewhat difficult to explain through the medium of words.
Even in this case, justice delayed is (in a very strange, contorted way) justice denied.
Did you not notice that a WW2 Nazi SS war criminal started serving a jail term only NOW, when he is ninety years old?
Yes, I did. And I have the same reaction. Such people, who do things when they are young, should be executed there and then. Punishing them when they are old is senseless.
I think this is the same feeling which gives rise to prescription.
My sense of justice tells me that a punishment after so long is not a travesty of justice but a perversion.
No, he is not the same person. He is worse. He is sobbing because his life’s ambition has not been fulfilled and he has seen the inglorious death of the man who financed him. Now he must spend the rest of his life coming to terms with failure.
The world got rid of a terrorist when Gaddafi was shot; now it is hoped that this Carlos stays in prison for his remaining days and may he die repenting his past deeds and hope that God will forgive him, because, I feel, that the world will not.
Moro was captured in March 1978 and killed in May 1978 – two months and not 4 years later…
[Daphne – That’s what happens when English is your third or fourth language. You make gross mistakes and accuse others of doing so. My reference to ‘four years later’ is to four years after Patty Hearst’s kidnapping. Hearst was kidnapped in 1974, and Aldo Moro was kidnapped FOUR YEARS LATER. Had I meant that he was killed four years after he was kidnapped, then I would have put a comma after kidnapped, thus: “when Aldo Moro was kidnapped, and killed four years later”. One must have such a great deal of patience.]
yes sure… at least I can spell għaka…
[Daphne – A very useful skill, indeed. Congratulations.]
Maybe Ray can solve the Luciano Busuttil riddle for us.
Yesterday evening KMB was on Smash, ranting about Iran’s right to bear nuclear weapons.
He argued that if Israel is allowed to have the deterrent, Iran must have them for its own safety, and that Malta should be the leading voice in the Meditteranean to this end. It’s the neutral position you see.
One wonders what he thinks of the sentence handed down yesterday, now that Gaddafi’s gone.
KMB was, in the Jackal’s heyday, our prime minister.
KMB is a daily reminder of why voters over the age of forty should not vote Labour.
Or under.
Ah, but you’re assuming that everyone has a good memory.
Gonzi is a constant reminder why anyone living the here and now should not vote PN.
Readers might wish to become aware of following movies and seek an opportunity to watch the respective movies, both of which are instructive and entertaining:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1321865/
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1023490/
I recall that during the weeks of Moro’s kidnapping, an American officer was also kidnapped in Rome, somehow he was traced and freed, a case forgotten by the media.
When talking about people like Carlos, we must remember these people also belong to the ‘world’ of international political intrigue. Why should Moro’s family declare after his assassination ‘that we shall shut ourselves in silence’.
Many wanted Moro out of the way and they succeeded
That was Gen James Lee Dozier – he was in fact kidnapped more than 3 years after Moro (December 1981) and liberated by an anti-terrorist team in January 1982.
And Abu Nidal? Another name to conjure with – and their connections to Malta.
In 1966 Carlos was in London and it’s rumored he had dealings with Maltese gangsters in Soho .
[Daphne – He would have been 17 at the time.]
So I guess, Jason Bourne can put his mind at rest now. The Jackal featured in Robert Ludlum’s Bourne Trilogy, and became Bourne’s main hunt . He wasn’t a fictitious character after all.