Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, better known as Carlos the Jackal, is not known for shunning the spotlight. For years he was the world’s most wanted terrorist and once claimed, in front of the TV cameras, to have killed more than 1,500 people in the pursuit of Palestinian liberation.
However, the Venezuelan revolutionary — serving life imprisonment for the murder of two French intelligence officials and their informant in 1975 — seems to have decided not all publicity is good publicity.
With the help of his wife, a French lawyer whom he married in prison, Sanchez — once described as “the most dangerous man alive” — is suing a Parisian production company over a three-part TV drama he claims could violate his “biographical image.”
Isabelle Coutant-Peyre has demanded the producers hand over the master copy of the footage for her to check for errors and potentially make changes before it is broadcast on the French Canal+ channel.
Coutant-Peyre told a court in Nanterre last month the drama, which has not yet been finished, would make her husband out to be the instigator of crimes of which he has not been found guilty.
“You’d have thought it was the prosecutor narrating ... it’s a film against Ramirez Sanchez,” she said.
Lawyers for Film en Stock, meanwhile, insisted handing over the film would be a violation of its creative rights.
“How could we tarnish the image of Carlos when he himself has claimed to be behind almost 2,000 deaths?” asked the company’s lawyer, Richard Malka.
Daniel Leconte, the firm’s owner and the producer of the three-part drama, said he had never allowed any of his subjects access to his material before it was aired.
“For us, this would be catastrophic,” he said. “It would mean that every time we make a film we are giving our subjects the right to direct their own lives.”
He said the film would be presented clearly as a fictional interpretation of a real man’s life and could not be taken as an attempt at a factual biography.
“As far as the facts are concerned, we know almost everything about him already,” he said. “Carlos’ own life actions destroyed his name. He doesn’t need me for that.”
Ramirez Sanchez, who was given his nickname after a copy of Frederick Forsyth’s novel The Day of the Jackal was found in his belongings and mistakenly believed to be his, was wanted in at least five European countries at the peak of his notoriety.
He was eventually captured by French police while recovering from surgery in Sudan in 1994 and has been in prison ever since, having been sentenced in absentia to life in jail.
The 60-year-old is awaiting a new trial before a special anti-terrorism tribunal for other attacks in the early 1980s.
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