Ex-guerrilla Carlos to sue France over solitary confinement

PARIS (Reuters) -- Convicted murderer Carlos the Jackal is taking France to the European Court of Human Rights for holding him in solitary confinement for almost six years, a lawyer for the former guerrilla leader said Thursday.

Allegedly responsible for killing at least 80 people and injuring hundreds more during his terror campaigns of the 1970s and 1980s, Carlos accuses the French state of using isolation as a torture tactic.

"This type of treatment, used to destroy a person both physically and psychologically, is formally outlawed by international conventions," his lawyer, Isabelle Coutant Peyre, said in a statement.

"Six years of uninterrupted isolation is a record which will lead to the inevitable condemnation of the French state," she added. The French Justice Ministry said it had no immediate comment on the complaint.

Carlos has been locked up in the high-security wing of Sante prison in Paris since August 1994 after the Sudanese authorities handed him over to French agents in Khartoum.

The Venezuelan-born former guerrilla, whose real name is Illich Ramirez Sanchez, was found guilty in 1997 of murdering three people in 1975, including two French policemen, and sentenced to life in prison.

He still faces charges for four other attacks in France in the early 1980s in which 14 people died and 200 were injured.

If the Strasbourg-based European Court of Human Rights decides to hear Carlos's complaint, it could take years before it reaches a decision.

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