ected him in the thigh with a hypodermic containing a tranquilliser. A stretcher was produced and Carlos was bundled unceremoniously into a van that drove him to Khartoum airport where an executive jet was standing by. By the time the jet had cleared Sudanese airspace, Carlos realised that his captors were French, what he did not know was that he was in the hands of the DST. He was then placed in a sack and bound tightly, with only his hooded head protruding. Six-and-a half hours later, the jet landed at Villacoublay military airport outside Paris where he was handed over to another DST team and driven to their Paris headquarters. As soon as he was unloaded and taken inside the building, Judge Jean-Louis Bruguiere issued Carlos with a national arrest warrant for the murder of two DST agents at Rue Toullier in 1979. By issuing such a warrant, the French government avoided the cumbersome process of applying to Interpol for an extradition order. To confirm the prisoner's identity, his fingerprints were taken and compared with those lifted from drinking glasses at Rue Toullier and the thumbprints from the letter of demand that was sent to Gaston Deferre. Satisfied that they had the right man, the DST then escorted Carlos to La Sante, a maximum-security prison. The official announcement of Carlos's capture differed somewhat from the truth, when Charles Pasqua announced that the Sudanese government had assisted in the service of the arrest warrant and the DST had then captured Carlos when he landed at Villacoublay airfield, when they had in fact violated several International laws by taking Carlos out of Sudan by force. On Friday, December 12, 1997, Carlos was led into a courtroom in the Palais de Justice and placed in the dock. Within minutes of the trials commencement, Carlos, charged formally as Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, demanded that the proceedings be abandoned on the grounds that he had been arrested illegally. His pleas fell on ...
