A group of high ranking officials from the French government security service DST met their Sudanese counterparts to lay out their proposal. They had evidence the man they were seeking was hiding out in the country, and were prepared to offer Sudan substantial concessions on some high tech communications equipment if Sudan would assist them in the capture. That man, Carlos the Jackal — the nom de guerre of Ilich Ramirez Sanchez — was the most wanted international terrorist in the world before Osama bin Laden came on the scene.

On this day, August 15, in 1994, at approximately 3 am in a small villa on the outskirts of Sudan, Carlos the Jackal was roused from his bed, handcuffed and taken by airplane out of Sudan towards France, where he would stand trial.

Born to a Marxist family in Táchira, Venezuela, Sanchez was brought up idolizing South American revolutionaries like Che Guevara and, thanks for his father’s connections, groomed by the KGB for fomenting socialist uprisings. Instead, Carlos aligned himself the Palestinian independence movement that used terrorism as their main tactic. Sanchez claimed credit for the deaths of more than 1,500 people for the cause of Palestinian independence.