Hungary Gave Carlos Refuge

Carlos, the world’s most wanted terrorist, was given refuge by Hungary’s former Communist government at the end of the 1970s and early 1980s, Interior Minister Balazs Horvath said Wednesday.

Horvath told a television program that Carlos was sheltered in Hungary with the full knowledge of senior members of the government, possibly including the late Communist leader Janos Kadar.

“Carlos and his team stayed in Hungary with the permission of the Politburo at the end of the 1970s and the early 1980s,” said Horvath, who took office with Hungary’s first post-Communist government last month.

An assassin, hostage-taker and commando mastermind, Carlos always kept one step ahead of Western efforts to track him down, creating a mythology that rarely separated fact from fiction in his shadowy and spectacular life.

Venezuelan-born, his real name was Ilych Ramirez Sanchez.

He joined the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine in the late 1960s and was credited with guerrilla operations stretching from Western Europe through the Middle East to Japan.

The most dramatic was the kidnaping in 1975 of 11 ministers attending a meeting of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries in Vienna.

Fours years ago, the Israeli newspaper Davar said he was believed dead and buried in Libya--probably killed by Libyan agents because he knew too much about Arab intelligence networks. The information has never been confirmed.