Today is Thursday, December 24th, 2020.

On this day in 1997, Elich Ramirez Sanchez was sentenced by a French court to life in

prison for the murders of two French investigators and a Lebanese national.

Welcome to Today in True Crime, a Spotify original from Parcast. Today we're covering the punishment of international terrorist Elich Ramirez Sanchez,

also known as Carlos the Jackal. He received a life sentence for three murders committed in

1975. Let's go back to a Parisian courtroom on December 24, 1997, around 120 a.m.

Just over an hour past midnight, after a.

After a grueling eight-day trial, three judges and nine jurors were finally

ready to render their verdict. For the past week, the courthouse was perhaps the most secure

location in all of France. Machine gun toting guards kept nonstop watch over the building

and its surrounding streets, not to mention the courtroom itself,

which was swept for bombs and other explosive devices at regular intervals.

The defendant, 48-year-old Elich Ramirez Sanchez, better known as Carlos the Jackal,

stood beside his lawyer, Isabel Couton-Pere. In the preceding years, Kuton-Pair

had become almost as infamous and reviled as her current client for defending a string of high-profile

terrorists and murderers. But in those early morning hours, all eyes were on Carlos. Dressed in a blue blazer with an ascot and an open-necked

shirt, Carlos the Jackal looked more like a man eating lunch at a yacht club than someone on trial

for the murder of three men. Even more incongruous was the fact that he was being tried for crimes that few people had ever heard of.

To millions of people around the world, he was known as the mastermind behind the OPEC raid in Vienna,

in which he and a group of terrorists stormed the organization's office, took 60 members hostage, and executed three.

He later was charged and convicted for orchestrating train bombings all across France throughout the 1980s,

which killed 11 people and injured hundreds more. He had managed to evade authorities around the world for more than 25 years,

...