Professionalism among terrorists

The subject of several novels and motion pictures, Venezuelan-born Vladimir Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, known as Carlos the Jackal, was a notorious terrorist, who is serving a life sentence in France for three murders in Paris in 1975.

Professionalism among terrorists? Carlos the Jackal does not think so — at least, not in the case of Al-Qaeda. “They are not professionals. They’re not organized. They don’t even know how to make proper explosives or proper detonators,” he said, according to a July 15th report from the UK-based newspaper, The Sunday Times. Vladimir Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, known as Carlos the Jackal, who was a member of the leftist Popular Front for Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), earned world-wide notoriety for leading the four-person team that assaulted a meeting of OPEC leaders in Vienna in 1975 and took over sixty hostages, including 11 oil ministers. With the help of Colonel Muammar Gadaffi, the Libyan leader, Saddam Hussein in Iraq and a network of bases behind the Iron Curtain, he was able to elude capture by the CIA and French intelligence for over a decade. Finally, in 1994 Sudanese authorities handed Sanchez over to French agents of the DST (Directorate of Territorial Surveillance). In the early 1990s, he had sought protection in Sudan after many years in Eastern Europe and the Middle East. In his telephone interview with the newspaper, Sanchez, now 57, overweight and diabetic, said he was saddened by any loss of life in London, where he lived as a young man and attacked what he called a lack of professionalism in some cells linked to Al-Qaeda. “Kensington and Chelsea were places where I spent my youth, so I’m not happy about people getting killed in the streets of London,” he said. Sanchez goes on trial in January for four bomb attacks in France in 1982 and 1983 that killed 12 people and wounded more than 100.