1949: Born in Venezuela: the Birth of Carlos the Jackal, the Worlds Most Wanted Terrorist
Ilich Ramirez Sanchez was born in Venezuela on 12 October 1949, the son of a Marxist lawyer who named him after Lenin. Raised between a devoutly Catholic mother and a father devoted to revolutionary politics, he would grow up to become one of the most notorious political terrorists of the twentieth century.
As Carlos the Jackal, he carried out assassinations, bombings and hostage takings across Europe through the 1970s and into the 1980s, including the infamous 1975 raid on the OPEC headquarters in Vienna. For years he evaded capture using a fake Peruvian passport bearing the alias Carlos Andres Martinez Torres, fitted with a deliberately poor photograph he later admitted was a likeness intentionally bad, designed to throw investigators off his trail. That very passport, seized by French police who did not yet know his real identity, is the reason the world came to know him only as Carlos.
