On this date in 1994, terrorist Illich Ramirez Sanchez,
long known as Carlos the Jackal, is captured in Khartoum, Sudan, by French
intelligence agents.
Tuesday, August 14, 2012
Francis Blandy is Poisoned (1751) & Terrorist Illich Ramirez Sanches AKA Carlos the Jackal is Captured (1994)
On this date in 1751, Mary Blandy poisons her father Francis Blandy at his home outside London, England.
Later that night, Blandy's daughter Mary offered one of
the family's servants a large sum of money to help her get to France
immediately. Mary was forced to flee on her own when he refused, but she was
chased down and caught by neighbors who had heard that Blandy had been
poisoned. The servants in the Blandy home had been suspicious of Mary because
the unmarried 26-year-old had been having an affair with William Cranstoun, a
penniless man with a wife back in Scotland, against her father's wishes.
Cranstoun was determined to get a piece of the Blandy fortune. Blandy had
initially approved of the match, even allowing Cranstoun to live in their
house. But when Cranstoun wrote his wife and kindly asked if she wouldn't mind
disavowing their marriage, Mrs. Cranstoun became outraged and caused quite a
local stir. Cranstoun was then abruptly tossed out of the house, yet Mary
continued to see Cranstoun behind her father's back. The couple, frustrated at
their inability to touch Mary's sizeable dowry, decided to find another route
to the money. Mary began slipping small amounts of arsenic into her father's
food, slowly poisoning him over a period of months. As Blandy began to suffer
from nausea and acute stomach pain, the servants grew suspicious. One found
white powder in the bottom of a pan that Mary had used to feed her father.
After Blandy eventually died, the cook saw Mary trying to dispose of the white
powder and managed to preserve some of it. Mary was charged with murder and
faced trial at Oxford Assizes in March 1752. Doctors testifying for the
prosecution agreed that Francis Blandy had been poisoned with arsenic. But the
test they used on the powder was rather unscientific: They heated it and
smelled the vapors, which everyone agreed was clearly arsenic. It wasn't until
40 years later that chemists finally developed true toxicology tests for
arsenic. But the jury remained convinced, and Mary was sent to the gallows. She
told the executioner, "Do not hang me too high, for the sake of
decency." Not long after Mary was executed, Cranstoun, who had escaped to
France, died in poverty.
Since there was no
extradition treaty with Sudan, the French agents sedated and kidnapped Carlos.
The Sudanese government, claiming that it had assisted in the arrest, requested
that the United States remove their country from its list of nations that
sponsor terrorism. Sanchez, who was affiliated with the Popular Front for the
Liberation of Palestine, the Organization for Armed Arab Struggle, and the
Japanese Red Army, was widely believed to be responsible for numerous terrorist
attacks between 1973 and 1992. In 1974, he took the French ambassador and 10
others hostage at the Hague, demanding that French authorities release Yutaka
Furuya of the Japanese Red Army. On June 27, 1975, French police officers tried
to arrest Sanchez in a Paris apartment, but he killed two officers in an
ensuing gun battle and escaped. In June 1992, Sanchez was tried in absentia for
these murders and convicted. On December 21, 1975, Sanchez and a group of his
men took 70 OPEC officials hostage at a Vienna conference. They made it to
safety with somewhere between $25 million and $50 million in ransom money, but
not before killing three hostages. Sanchez claimed responsibility for these
crimes in an interview with the Arab magazine, Al Watan al Arabi. In the
subsequent trial that resulted in his imprisonment, Sanchez was represented by
Jacque Verges, who had reportedly helped to organize a failed rocket attack on
a French nuclear power plant in 1982. Verges was also accused of sending a
threatening letter from Sanchez to the French authorities so that Sanchez's
girlfriend (possibly his wife), German terrorist Magdalena Kopp, could be
released. He bitterly denied the charges.
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