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LONDON — For more than two decades, "Carlos the Jackal" was the symbol of international terrorism.

This high-living killer-for-hire, who sowed fear around the world, inspired numerous books and movies.

But when the fabled terrorist, whose real name is Illich Ramirez Sanchez, was convicted of murder last week, it became clear that the mystique was gone.

It was a slightly comical, pathetic figure of a debauched and overweight 48-year-old playboy who emerged from a Paris court to start serving a life sentence for killing two French secret service agents and their Lebanese accomplice in a Paris apartment on June 27, 1975.

Those charges reflected a mere token of the killings attributed to the Venezuelan-born doctrinaire Marxist, who is estimated to have taken at least 80 lives on behalf of his Palestinian and other masters.

France still expects to try Carlos for his alleged role in a series of bombings that claimed 17 lives in France between 1979 and 1982.

He is also wanted in Germany for allegedly bombing Berlin's French cultural center, and in Austria for his most spectacular raid — the kidnapping of 11 OPEC oil ministers in Vienna in 1975.

The trial marked the official end of Carlos' career, but he had already been supplanted by international terrorists of a different ilk.

Carlos has little in common with the shadowy Islamic terrorists of the 1990s, who specialize in indiscriminate mass murder as they pursue jihad, holy war, against what they see as the godless West with the promise of paradise-to-come.

Their austere faith bears no resemblance to Carlos' dedication to the pursuit of bacchanalian pleasures: wine, women and chunky Cuban cigars by night; spy videos, business magazines and cafe culture by day.

The generation of terror that fostered Carlos was centered around a charismatic leader who was well paid and well connected, with networks that extended across Europe and into Asia — the Irish Republican Army in Britain, the Red Brigades in Italy, the Baader-Meinhof gang in Germany and the Japanese Red Army.

In contrast, Islamic terrorist groups tend to be centered around religious leaders such as the blind Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman, who inspired the bombing of New York's World Trade Center, and the quadriplegic Sheik Ahmed Yassin, Hamas' founder and champion of the Palestinian suicide bomber.

Carlos was a different breed.

Born in Venezuela in 1949, he is the son of a wealthy Marxist lawyer, Jose Altagarcia Ramirez Navas. His brothers, Vladimir and Lenin, were named for the Soviet leader.

At age 17, Carlos traveled to London to study chemistry — "I'm great at making explosives," he said at his trial. Two years later, in 1968, he enrolled at Moscow's Patrice Lumumba University, though Soviet authorities expelled him for participating in an unauthorized demonstration.

Having drunk deeply from the well of revolutionary thought, he emerged into the world in 1971 ready to put belief into practice.

He traveled to the Middle East and chose the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine — a militant, Marxist vehicle promoting the Palestinian cause — to launch his career as an international terrorist.

One of his first acts, in 1973, was to brazenly walk through the front door of the London home of Edward Sieff, then a prominent Zionist leader and head of the British chain store Marks & Spencer, and shoot him in the face.

Sieff survived, but the Jackal's career was launched.

By the end of the 1980s, however, the world in which Carlos thrived was changing.

After the Cold War ended and Middle Eastern governments began peacemaking efforts, Carlos was abandoned by the very states — Eastern European and Arab — that had supported his actions.

In 1991, Syria suggested that Carlos — who had established a comfortable life posing as a Mexican businessman in a Damascus suburb with his German wife and fellow terrorist, Magdalena Kopp, and two children — find a home elsewhere.

Refused shelter by Iraq and Libya, he finally found refuge in the Sudanese capital of Khartoum in August 1993.

By all accounts, Carlos spent his final year of freedom indulging in the pleasures of the flesh rather than revolutionary fervor.

He had shed his family and arrived in Sudan with a glamorous Lebanese belly dancer. Soon after, he acquired an attractive Sudanese companion.

What Carlos did not know was that once in Khartoum he was tracked by an American spy satellite, which is capable of monitoring objects as small as 6 inches in size.

On Aug. 13, 1996, Carlos finally let his guard down when he checked into Khartoum's Ibu Khalmud hospital for minor surgery on a testicle. That evening, plainclothes Sudanese state security agents persuaded him to transfer to a military hospital for his own security.

In the wee hours of Aug. 14, he was still groggy from the anesthetic when Sudanese security officials handed him over to French intelligence agents.