‘Jackal’ Blames CIA, Mossad for Killings; New Lawyers Named

Denouncing his murder prosecution as a “Zionist plot,” the terrorism suspect known as “Carlos the Jackal” accused the CIA and Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency on Monday of committing the killings for which he is being tried.

In the second day of the trial, the court appointed a new lawyer for the accused--whose real name is Ilich Ramirez Sanchez--when his three-member defense team walked out to protest the court’s refusal to order a new investigation.

Ramirez, 48, is being tried in the 1975 killings of two French intelligence agents, Raymond Dous and Jean Donatini, and of a Lebanese man, Michel Moukharbal, whom Ramirez suspected of being an informer. The agents were investigating Ramirez’s role in attacks on Israel’s El Al airlines at Paris’ Orly Airport.

Ramirez, who faces a 30-year prison sentence in each of the killings, was convicted in 1992 in absentia. Under French law, he must be retried now.

The court earlier Monday rejected the defense’s request, made Friday, to throw out the trial on the grounds that Ramirez was illegally abducted from Sudan, where he was living openly, three years ago.

The defense lawyers withdrew from the trial after the court refused another demand to investigate the CIA’s and Mossad’s alleged role.

“These policemen were sent to the slaughterhouse by Israeli agents,” the Venezuelan-born Ramirez told the court.

He later denounced the Paris trial as a “judicial scandal.”

“I refuse to prostitute myself in this abstract rite,” Ramirez said, claiming, once again, that he was the victim of a “Zionist plot.”

Ramirez gained international notoriety as the Cold War-era mastermind of deadly bombings, assassinations and hostage dramas.