Mansoor Ijaz - often enough seen as a talking head in the early days of the GWOT was one of the intermediaries, after the Sudanese turned Carlos the Jackal over to the French, that the Sudanese gov used to communicate with the Clinton admin. I haven't heard much from him lately, maybe someone else has.
Carlos the Jackal's wife is a lawyer with some ties to the Moussaoui case and the Christmas Market plot case in France. Carlos has connections to Venezuela and so, probably Hugo Chavez.
stepping back in time...
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/396846.stm
Saturday, July 17, 1999 Published at 10:25 GMT 11:25 UK
World: Americas
“Carlos the columnist “
By BBC Correspondent Peter Greste
ARTICLE SNIPPET: “To most of the Western world, Illich Ramirez Sanchez is Carlos the Jackal, the world’s most notorious terrorist who masterminded a bloody catalogue of murders, kidnappings and hijackings throughout the 1970s.
But now he has begun writing a column for a weekly newspaper, La Razon, in Venezuela, his home country.
And he has become a leftist hero to thousands of Venezuelans.
From the solitary confines of his French prison cell, where he is serving a life sentence for murder, Mr Sanchez offers his revolutionary thoughts each week in a column called La Bastilla, Spanish for the Bastille.”
ARTICLE SNIPPET: “Among the Jackal’s admirers is the Venezuelan President, Hugo Chavez, who has admitted writing to him in prison.
President Chavez addressed Carlos as a distinguished compatriot and defended the letter by saying it showed human solidarity not political support.
A group of left-wing figures has also launched a solidarity committee as a rallying point for Carlos’s supporters.
They are unlikely to succeed in securing his freedom, but his articles are winning him sympathy amongst his countrymen.”