Posted on 12/12/2003 12:55:24 PM PST by TexKat
CARACAS, Venezuela - Venezuelan-born terrorist Carlos the Jackal, who gained notoriety for a string of deadly Cold War era bombings, revealed that he lived in Miami in 1961 and was once detained by the FBI, according to a letter published this week.
Carlos, whose real name is Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, said he and his father lived two blocks from Miami's Orange Bowl stadium and frequently received visits from Venezuelan exiles plotting to overthrow then-President Romulo Betancourt.
"I would stand guard to see if FBI patrols were in the vicinity, so that our guests could move about untroubled," Ramirez said in a letter published in the pro-government daily newspaper Vea. "This didn't prevent me from being detained once by FBI agents."
Ramirez gave no further details about his arrest and subsequent release. The FBI could not immediately comment on Sanchez' allegations, spokeswoman Beverly Esselbach said Friday.
Ramirez is serving life in a French prison for the 1975 murders of two French secret agents and an alleged informer. He was arrested in Khartoum, Sudan, in 1994.
Ramirez claims to have killed 83 people and testified he led an attack that killed three others in 1975 at the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries headquarters in Vienna. He also has been linked to the 1976 hijacking of an Air France jet to Entebbe, Uganda.
Servando Garcia Ponce, director of information for Vea, said Friday the newspaper received the letter from a relative of Ramirez. Vea's chief editor is a Communist Party leader and confidante of President Hugo Chavez, who once wrote a letter to Ramirez addressing him as "Dear Compatriot."
The letter is a tribute to his recently deceased father, Jose Altagracia Ramirez Naval, a wealthy attorney who co-founded Venezuela's Communist Party. Ramirez describes his father as a mentor who taught him everything about organizing conspiracies.
"My father taught me the rules of conspiracy," Ramirez said. "I must recognize that I am who I am because of the political formation my father gave me."
The elder Ramirez named his three sons after Russian revolutionary Vladimir Ilyich Lenin.
In 2001, Vice President Jose Vicente Rangel, then Venezuela's defense minister, said Venezuela didn't consider Carlos a terrorist because he hadn't been convicted of any crimes in Venezuela.
At the time, Venezuela's foreign ministry emphasized that Venezuela condemned terrorism but had a responsibility to respect Ramirez' rights.
Venezuela has said it could ask France to retry Ramirez if his rights were violated when he was captured in Sudan and brought to France. The two countries have no extradition treaty.
In 2001, Ramirez told the France Soir newspaper that he felt "relief" when he heard about the Sept. 11 attacks. He said he never had links with Osama bin Laden , but had "strategic points of agreement" with al-Qaida.
'The title of his tome translates as Revolutionary Islam, and parts of it read like fan mail to those Muslim heroes who replaced Marx and Lenin on the Jackals hit parade. No. 1, of course, is Osama bin Laden, whom Carlos calls luminous and the living symbol of Jihad. Writing of September 11, the Jackal says the collapse before the cameras of those insolent twin towers, which stood there in defiance of the Third Worlds misery [shook] the West out of its somnambulant torpor.'
Par for the course.
That's where "Chapita" came from.
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