`My Name Is Ilich Ramirez Sanchez' -- Carlos The Jackal's Murder Trial Begins

PARIS - One of the most sought-after terrorist suspects of the Cold War smiled slightly when asked to identify himself today.

"My name is Ilich Ramirez Sanchez. My profession is professional revolutionary. The world is my domain. My last address was Khartoum, in Sudan."

With that, trial opened for the man known as Carlos the Jackal - a flamboyant mastermind of bombings, assassinations and hostage dramas. By his own count, he killed 83 people.

After decades eluding authorities, Ramirez is being tried for manslaughter in the 1975 Paris killings of two French investigators and a man he suspected as an informer. Prosecutors hope to put the 48-year-old former communist terrorist behind bars for 30 years.

Though his terrorist ties are believed to have dried up and his East bloc backers lost their jobs with the Soviet collapse, French authorities took no chances with security for the weeklong trial of the Venezuelan-born Ramirez.

Ramirez arrived at the Palais de Justice in a convoy of police brandishing submachine guns. Sharpshooters were deployed around the building and all its entrances were equipped with body scanners.

Each of the nine jurors, nine alternates and three judges were assigned two bodyguards and a chauffeur.

As the six women jurors stepped to the front of the courtroom, the defendant, long known as a lady's man, beamed a smile at each one, drawing laughter from the public.

Then, growing serious, he addressed the court in heavily accented French, taking his defense into his own hands to argue that the case should be thrown out.

"I can't be judged because of the conditions of my arrest," Ramirez said, referring to his capture in Sudan in August 1994. Reportedly, his captors gave him a mysterious injection and spirited him out of the country in a sack.

The judge recessed the trial today to decide on the dismissal request.

Security in the capital already had been increased during this month's trial of suspected Muslim militants linked to Algerian-related terror bombings in recent years.

Aside from deadly bombings and killings in France, Ramirez is most infamous for his participation in the 1972 massacre of 11 Israeli athletes by Palestinian commandos at the Munich Olympics. He plotted the 1975 seizure of OPEC oil ministers and the 1976 Palestinian hijacking of a French jetliner to Entebbe, Uganda, that ended with an Israeli commando raid.

Ramirez was trained as a guerrilla in Cuba and Moscow and joined the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

Twenty-two years ago, in June 1975, he was posing as a student in a tiny Latin Quarter apartment near the Sorbonne when two unarmed investigators knocked on his door.

Raymond Dous and Jean Donatini, of the Direction de la Securite du Territoire - France's FBI - were probing an attack on Israel's El Al airlines at Paris' Orly Airport in January of that year.

Arriving at 9 rue Tollier with the two investigators was Michel Moukharbal, a fellow militant arrested earlier that month. Moukharbal pointed to Ramirez as a suspect and Ramirez opened fire, killing him and the two agents before fleeing the country.

Ramirez was convicted in absentia in 1992, but French law requires a retrial upon the suspect's return to the country.

Ramirez's fingerprints on the pistol and his description of the killings in an interview are giving the prosecution a virtually open-and-shut case. But observers say he might use his secrets to work out a deal that could eventually get him out of jail or secure his early release.

Bernard Violet, author of "Carlos - The Secret Networks of International Terrorism," said Ramirez has information about other terrorist groups, including Algeria's Armed Islamic Group and Hamas, that French intelligence covets.

Ramirez has spent his time behind bars reading up on French law and studying the language. He and his lawyers were expected to ask the court to throw out the case, contending he was illegally abducted by French agents in Sudan.

"He will use the arms needed for that battlefield, and that's to use legal means to say what he wants to say politically," a lawyer for Ramirez, Isabelle Coutant-Peyre, said.