Historical Dictionary of Terrorism Third Edition

94 • CARLOS21 December 1975 in which he held 11 OPEC oil ministers hostageand collected a massive ransom from the governments of Iran andSaudi Arabia, reportedly over $50 million.After that episode he dropped out of view. For some time it wasspeculated that he was either dead or else had become a trainer ofterrorists in Libya or Syria. In 1983 a group calling itself the Organizationfor the Armed Arab Struggle surfaced, reportedly underCarlos’s leadership, and carried out the bombing of a Paris-Toulousetrain, the Capitole, in March 1982, and the bombing of a train stationin Marseilles in December 1983, apparently to put pressure onthe French government to release his lover, Magdelena Kopp, a RedArmy Faction (RAF) member serving a jail sentence in France ona conviction for illegal possession of firearms and explosives. Aftersome brief activity, this group also subsided into obscurity.In the 1980s Carlos settled in Damascus, Syria, where he wasreunited in December 1985 with Kopp, whom he then married. Heremained in Syria under the protection of President Hafiz al Asad untilDecember 1993, when French officials learned of his whereaboutsand began to press for his extradition. The Syrian government,which was finding its association with terrorist groups an embarrassment,forced him to leave. Carlos apparently spent time in Yemenbefore deciding to move to Sudan. He was arrested by Sudaneseofficials on 14 August 1994 and handed over to French officials. Itseemed the governments of both Syria and Sudan viewed Carlos asan anachronistic misfit and saw political advantages with the Westin helping to turn him over since he was no longer a useful asset fortheir current political agendas.Carlos boasted of having been responsible for killing 83 people in the1970s and 1980s, although French authorities considered him a suspectin terrorist attacks in which 15 people were killed and over 200 injuredin France alone. For a long time the mass media wrongly associatedhim with the Black September Organization (BSO) attack on theIsraeli Olympic team in 1972, and he was rumored to have been linkedto more than 30 other major terrorist actions. Most of this was part ofa myth that Carlos himself helped spin, but upon his arrest most terroristexperts, among them Brian Jenkins, stated that his significance hadbeen greatly exaggerated and that he was often a mediocre and bunglingterrorist. After a 10-day trial, he was sentenced on 24 December 1997to life imprisonment for murdering three people in 1975, namely, two