The group did not perform its first acts until early in 1982, with a failed attack on a French nuclear power station, the Superphénix.

When two of the group, including Magdalena Kopp, Carlos's wife, were arrested in Paris, the group detonated a number of bombs in retaliation against French targets. Operations in 1983 included attacks on the Maison de France in West Berlin in August in which one man was killed and 22 injured.

On December 31, 1983, bombs on two TGV trains exploded, killing four passengers and injuring dozens more. Within days of the bombings, Carlos sent letters to three separate news agencies claiming responsibility for the bombings as revenge for a French air strike against a PFLP training camp in Lebanon the previous month.

These attacks led to pressure on East European states that tolerated Carlos. For over two years, he lived in Hungary, in Budapest's noble quarter, the second district. His main cutout for some of his financial resources, such as Gaddhafi or Dr. George Habash, was the friend of his sister, "Dietmar C", a known German terrorist and the leader of the Panther Brigade of the PFLP. Carlos was expelled from Hungary in late 1985 and was refused aid in Iraq, Libya, and Cuba before he found limited support in Syria. He settled in Damascus with Kopp and their daughter, Elba Rosa.

The Syrian government forced Carlos to remain inactive, and he was soon no longer seen as a threat but as a pathetic figure. In 1990, however, the Iraqi government approached him, and, in September 1991, he was expelled from Syria and eventually found a temporary home in Jordan. He then found better protection in Sudan and moved to Khartoum.

During his career, most of it during the Cold War, Western accounts persistently claimed he was a KGB agent, but the link is tenuous at best.[citation needed] It is now clear that he had no part in the Munich Massacre (the attack on Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympiad in 1972) or the 1976 hijacking of Air France Flight 139 to Entebbe.[citation needed] Some attacks may have been attributed to him for lack of anyone else to claim credits. His own boasts about probably nonexistent missions have obfuscated the matter even more.

The French and U.S. intelligence agencies offered a number of deals to the Sudanese authorities. In 1994, Carlos was scheduled to undergo a minor testicular operation on a varicose vein on his scrotum in a hospital in Sudan. Two days after the operation, Carlos was told by Sudanese officials that he needed to be moved to a villa for protection from an assassination attempt where he would be given personal bodyguards. One night later, his own bodyguards burst into his room while he slept, and he was tranquilized, tied up, and taken from the villa. On August 14, 1994, he was handed over to French agents of the DST and flown to Paris. He was charged with the Paris murders of two policemen and PFLP-guerrilla-turned-French informant Michel Moukharbal in 1975 and sent to La Santé Prison in Paris to await trial.[citation needed]

The trial began on December 12, 1997, and ended on December 23, when he was found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment.[citation needed] Carlos the Jackal, who had been imprisoned in La Santé, was later moved to the Clairvaux Prison. He is currently imprisoned in La Santé.

In 2001 in a Muslim ceremony, Ramírez Sánchez married his lawyer, Isabelle Coutant-Peyre, although he was still legally wed to his second wife.