FOR two decades until his capture in 1994, Carlos the Jackal murdered, bombed and kidnapped his way to infamy, retaining the title of world’s most dangerous terrorist before Osama Bin Laden stole his crown.

But speaking from the Clair-vaux prison in northeast France last week he berated terrorist cells said to have targeted Britain, criticising them for plotting to kill ordinary people.

In his first telephone interview with a newspaper, the Venezue-lan-born Vladimir Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, 57, said he was saddened by any loss of life in London, where he lived as a young man. He also attacked what he called a lack of professionalism in some cells linked to Al-Qaeda.

Sanchez is serving a life sentence for three murders in Paris in 1975. He will go on trial again in January over four bomb attacks in France in 1982 and 1983 that killed 12 people and wounded more than 100.

Sanchez, who is now overweight and diabetic, showed no remorse, laughing when asked about the number of his victims.

“I’m not a sadist or a maso-chist – I don’t enjoy the suffering of others,” he claimed in a thick Latin American accent. “When we had to eliminate them it was in a cold, simple way with the least pain possible.”

His most audacious attack was the kidnapping of 11 oil ministers in Vienna in 1975, which elicited an estimated £10m in ransom. He eluded the CIA and French intelligence with the help of Colonel Muammar Gadaffi, the Libyan leader, Saddam Hus-sein in Iraq and a network of bases behind the Iron Curtain.

“Kensington and Chelsea were places where I spent my youth, so I’m not happy about people getting killed in the streets of London,” he said.

He condemned Al-Qaeda followers without specific targets, saying: “They are not professionals. They’re not organised. They don’t even know how to make proper explosives or proper detonators.”

Sanchez was a self-styled “professional revolutionary” who studied in Moscow in the 1960s before signing up with a Palestinian guerrilla movement. After being dispatched to London in the 1970s, he taught Spanish at a secretarial college in Mayfair, where he flirted with students while making lists of people to be kidnapped or murdered.

His first attempt failed when Joseph Edward Sieff, the president of Marks & Spencer, was shot at his home in St John’s Wood in 1973, but survived.

In 1975, Sanchez shot dead two unarmed counter-intelli-gence officers and an informer near the Sorbonne. When a journalist found a copy of Frederick Forsyth’s thriller The Day of the Jackal at his flat in Bayswater, west London, the nickname “Carlos the Jackal” followed.

To Sanchez’s irritation, it has stuck. He did not object to being called a terrorist but “Jackal” irked him because it was the nickname of an unpopular police chief in Venezuela.

“It was invented by the Guardian. It was my newspaper – I used to buy it every day,” he said.

In 1982 Carlos launched what French prosecutors call “a private war” when his then-girl-friend, Magdalena Kopp, and an accomplice were arrested in Paris with a car full of explosives.

He is accused of blowing up two trains, Marseilles railway station and a Paris street to secure Kopp’s freedom. She married Sanchez and had a daughter.

He dismissed his coming trial as “bullshit”, arguing that the French had no right to prosecute him because he had been illegally detained in Sudan in 1994 and brought to France. “I am being held hostage,” he claimed.

Asked about his victims, he said: “I don’t know how many I’ve killed . . . I’ve been fighting since I was 14. Fighting, fighting. Do you know how many people got killed in these fights?”

The French say the number was 83 but he said: “I couldn’t count. Less than 100 anyway.” And what had those deaths achieved? “Our example has been followed, not only by communists but even by jihadists.”

In 1991 he settled in Amman but sent his wife and daughter to live in Venezuela. “There were too many temptations - pretty girls and married women,” he said. He later married Lana Jarrar, a Jordanian 19 years his junior.

Since his arrest he has been married again, this time to his lawyer, Isabelle Coutant-Peyre. “I think things are more difficult for her than for me, but this is the price to pay for one’s struggle against the empire,” he said.

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