BERLIN, Aug 23 (AFP) - An alleged lieutenant of Carlos the Jackal, legendary international terrorist mastermind through two decades, was acquitted here Monday of murder and bomb attacks in France more than 20 years ago.
Johannes Weinrich, already serving a life sentence for other offences, was said to have been Carlos' deputy at the head of groups known as the International Revolutionary Organization and the Organization of Armed Arab Resistance.
His alleged master, the mysterious Venezuelan Ilich Ramirez Sanchez -- better known as Carlos the Jackal -- led spectacular extremist operations in the 1970s and 1980s including the 1975 Vienna kidnapping of oil ministers at an OPEC meeting.
But the mystery surrounding Carlos and his invincibility myth ended 10 years ago when French undercover agents seized him in Sudan. He is now 54 and doing life in French solitary confinement after being convicted of a triple murder committed in Paris in 1975.
Weinrich's lawyer asked the Berlin court to acquit him citing flaws in the legal procedure while the public prosecutor wanted life imprisonment for 1982-83 attacks, and murder.
During Weinrich's trial, the prosecution maintained he had been deputy to Carlos at the head of the two named extremist groups, and as such he was alleged to have organized three attacks in France.
But presiding judge Ralph Ehestaedt said evidence submitted was insufficient to find Weinrich guilty of the attacks that caused carnage in Paris, Marseille and Tain-l'Hermitage in southeast France.
In 1982, a car bomb explosion outside the Paris offices of the Arabic-language Watan al-Arabi newspaper killed a passer-by.
The prosecutor's office said Syrian intelligence agents were involved in the attack which aimed to killed the editor and destroy the building.
In 1983 two bombs went off within 20 minutes from each other, one at Marseille's main train station and the other in a high-speed train at Tain-l'Hermitage, killing five people.
Weinrich was arrested in Yemen in 1994 and deported to Germany the following year.
He is doing life in Germany for an attack on the French cultural centre in West Berlin in 1983 which killed one person and left 23 injured.
The court had postponed the Weinrich verdict in order to hear testimony from Carlos via video link. But Carlos refused.
Carlos, believed to have been the inspiration for Frederick Forsyth's best-selling novel "The Day of the Jackal" filmed in 1973, is allowed jail visits only from his lawyers and a French priest.
"Carlos has been a communist since the age of 14, and he continues to be one," said Isabelle Coutant-Peyre, the French lawyer he married after his conviction. But she added: "Communism is not synonymous with atheism".
In an interview conducted by telephone with French television channel M6 in March, Carlos refused to express remorse for his crimes and said: "There are no innocent victims".
He also said he admired Osama bin Laden, leader of the Al-Qaeda network blamed for the September 11, 2001 attacks in the United States.