The convicted terrorist known as Carlos the Jackal is to be tried in France for four attacks in the 1980s that killed 11 people and injured almost 200 others, a justice official said today.

Carlos - a Venezuelan whose real name is Illich Ramirez Sanchez - is already serving a life sentence in France for the murder of two French secret service agents but an examining magistrate has granted a request from prosecutors that he be tried for the other attacks.

He is charged with the March 29, 1982, bombing of a Paris-Toulouse train; the April 22, 1982, attack outside the Paris offices of newspaper Al Watan; and attacks on December 31, 1983, attacks on a TGV high-speed train and a Marseille station.

If convicted, any sentence will have to run concurrently with his existing life term handed down at a 1996 trial for the deaths of the secret service agents and their informer in 1975.

At the time of the attacks, Carlos was close to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, running a multinational group of activists throughout the globe with the support of the secret services of the then Communist bloc.

Carlos was once one of the most wanted men in the world, having shot to notoriety with the 1975 assault on an OPEC meeting in Vienna in which he and five others took 70 people hostage, including 11 oil ministers.

In 1994, France spirited Carlos out of his refuge in Sudan, where he had converted to Islam and married a local woman under Muslim rites. He has since married his French lawyer.

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