Carlos the Jackal took over his own defence yesterday, enabling his murder trial to resume after his legal team withdrew from the case in protest. The lawyers' walkout came after Judge Yves Corneloup rejected arguments that Carlos should be freed and his trial halted on the grounds his 1994 arrest in Sudan was illegal. The judge had ordered Ms Isabelle Coutant-Peyre to go on representing Carlos. But she refused, leaving her vulnerable to possible disciplinary action by the court.
Carlos, on trial for the 1975 killing in Paris of two French secret agents and a Lebanese informer, had reacted angrily to the judge's earlier refusal to call a halt to the trial on technical grounds.
His lawyers had argued that the Venezuelan guerrilla - real name Illich Ramirez Sanchez - could not be tried because the French secret agents who bundled him into a sack and on to a plane to Paris were not legally authorised to carry out the arrest. But the judge noted that his capture had been upheld by France's highest court, the Cour de Cassation.
The judge also rejected Carlos's attempt to have SOS Attentats, an association of victims of guerrilla attacks, prevented from participating as civil plaintiffs. Carlos had argued on Friday, that the association, whose president is Jewish, had "racist, extremist, Zionist and revisionist objectives".
After hearing Judge Corne loup's rulings, Carlos argued that the judge should be disqualified from presiding due to a conflict of interest with his previous work as an investigating magistrate.
Carlos, who became a legend of terror in his pro-Palestinian struggle in the 1970s and 1980s, is being re-tried for the 1975 killings after receiving a life sentence in absentia five years ago. The unarmed agents of France's Territorial Surveillance Directorate (DST), stumbled on Carlos's Paris hideout during a party.
According to prosecutors, Carlos went into a lavatory to retrieve a hidden pistol shortly after the agents entered the flat. As Carlos came out Michel Moukharbal, a Palestinian activist-turned-informant, identified him. Carlos pulled out the pistol and began firing.
At least two other countries want to try Carlos: Germany, for the bombing of Berlin's French cultural centre, and Austria, for his best-known guerrilla action - the kidnapping of 11 oil ministers at a Vienna OPEC meeting in 1975.