Writer denies Carlos confessed to murder

Tobon is the only civilian witness scheduled by the prosecution to give evidence at the trial and Carlos greeted her with apparent sarcasm on Wednesday: “Hello Ms Tobon. I’m delighted to see you in great form and so elegant after all these years.”

Befriended by “Carlos the Jackal” in the early 1970s when she was living in London, she denied that a 1978 account of a phone conservation in which the defendant had admitted to killing the informer and shooting at the officers was true.

In the Barcelona-published work about Carlos’ life entitled Carlos: Terrorist or Guerrilla Fighter?, Tobon wrote at the time that the Venezuelan confessed to the Paris shoot-out in a call to London from Paris, hours after the incident.

“It wasn’t true,” she said, adding that the book was a compilation of what she personally knew about Carlos between 1972 and 1975 and what she and an editor had read in the papers. “The call never took place.”

Cross-examined by Presiding Judge Yves Corneloup as to why she would have deliberately falsified an account that would spell extra trouble for her former friend, Tobon, now aged 59, said: “I just did it. I ask for his forgiveness. I wasn’t thinking about the consequences and it has brought me a lot of grief.”

Corneloup retorted that the relatives of the dead officers sitting in the court-room had “suffered more grief and torture in the 22 years waiting for Carlos to be brought to account for the deaths.”

The shooting occurred in a flat in Paris’s Latin Quarter where three unarmed officers, members of France’s DST counter-intelligence service, went with Carlos’s former friend and political ally Michel Moukharbal.

Moukharbal and two of the officers were shot at close range by Carlos who had been partying with three friends, and who then escaped by scrambling through a window. It was his closest call until his eventual capture in 1994, after a career across Europe and the Middle East believed to have caused scores of deaths.