Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, known as Carlos the Jackal, is a Venezuelan-born terrorist. After a privileged upbringing in Caracas and stints as a student in London and Moscow, he trained with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) in Beirut.
In 1975 he led an attack on OPEC's headquarters in Vienna in which three people were murdered and 40 hostages abducted. He was accused by Wadie Haddad, the PFLP's co-founder, of making off with the ransom payment. He spent the next two decades in communist-bloc countries and as a guest of the Middle East's most notorious tyrants, carrying out bombings and murders. Extraordinarily vain, he later boasted that he had murdered 80 people.
In 1994 he was captured by French agents in Khartoum while unconscious after surgery. He remains locked up in a French jail.
If I were to walk on water, the press would say I'm only doing it because I can't swim.