A key prosecution witness in the trial of Carlos the Jackal for triple murder yesterday denied the Venezuelan had confessed to the killings in a telephone conversation.
Venezuelan-born Carlos, whose real name is Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, faces spending the rest of his life behind bars if convicted for the June 27th, 1975, murders of two French policemen and a Lebanese informer.
As the trial in Paris went into its fourth day Ms Nydia Tobon, a Colombian political refugee, was brought in to give testimony.
Befriended by Carlos in the early 1970s when she was in London, she denied that a 1978 account of a phone conversation in which the defendant had admitted killing the informer and shooting at the officers was true.
In the Barcelona-published work about Carlos's life, entitled Carlos: Terrorist or Guerrilla Fighter?, Ms 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. "The call never took place."