‘Carlos the Jackal’, the guerrilla mastermind who eluded the best efforts of the Western world’s top security agencies for two decades before he was captured, is to answer charges in Franceover a series of bombings in the 1980s.

Here are some facts on the man born Ilich Ramirez Sanchez who once declared war on “Zionist and imperialist targets in all parts of the world.”

* GUERRILLA ACTS:

— He earned international notoriety for masterminding the December 1975 assault on an OPEC meeting in Vienna, where he and five others took about 70 people hostage, including 11 oil ministers. The audacious kidnappings made him the world’s most wanted man. Three people, including an Austrian policeman, were killed during the attack.

— Calling themselves “The Arm of the Arab Revolution,” the guerrillas demanded an aircraft which flew them and their captives to Algiers where most of the hostages were released. The plane then travelled to the Libyan capital, Tripoli, before returning to Algiers where the guerrillas gave themselves up. They were allowed to go free within a few days.

— Accusations against Ramirez have ranged from organizing the Japanese Red Army occupation of the French embassy in The Hague in December 1974, a rocket attack on an aircraft at Paris’s Orly airport and plots to assassinate business and political leaders.

— He cut his teeth in the assassination business in 1973 with the attempted murder of prominent British Zionist and Marks and Spencers chief, Edward Sieff, in London.

— Ramirez was found guilty in absentia in 1992 of the murders in 1975 of two French counter espionage agents and an accomplice turned informer.

* LIFE DETAILS:

— Ramirez was born in Venezuela in 1949, the son of a doctor of law who was a fervent left-winger. He named his sons with the various names of Lenin — Ilyich, Vladimir and Lenin.

— Ramirez got his nickname after a reporter saw a copy of Frederick Forsyth’s political thriller “The Day of the Jackal” in his flat and mistakenly assumed it to be his. “The Jackal” in the book was the fictional assassin sent to kill French president Charles de Gaulle.

— According to biographers Ramirez was expelled from Moscow’s Patrice Lumumba university, possibly at the same time as he was being trained by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), moving between Jordan, Lebanon and Syria.

— He later studied at the London School of Economics but broke off the course.

— In later years Carlos the Jackal’s name faded from the headlines and in 1986 an Israeli newspaper reported him dead, killed by Libyan agents because he knew too much about Arab intelligence networks.

— He was captured in the Sudanese capital, Khartoum, by French agents and brought back to France in August 1994.

— In Sudan, he had converted to Islam and married a local woman under Muslim rites. He had previously been married to Magdalena Kopp, a German former revolutionary.

— He was jailed for life in 1997 for killing the two French secret agents and a Lebanese fellow revolutionary.

— In 2001 Carlos married his attorney, Isabelle Coutant-Peyre, inside the Sante prison in France.

— On Monday he faces a three-judge terrorism panel to answer charges he was behind four urban bombings in France that killed 11 people and wounded nearly 200 in the early 1980s.