Pierre Carette

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Pierre Carette (born December 16, 1952 in Charleroi) was the leader of the Belgian extreme-left terrorist group Communist Combatant Cells or CCC. Although Carette was sentenced to life-long imprisonment for terrorist attacks, he was released in 2003.

Carette became politically active when establishing a committee striving for the release of captured members of the Red Army Faction (RAF) in West Germany. Before that, he had already distributed printwork calling for armed struggle against capitalism, including translation of RAF-pamphlets. In 1982, he published a magazine called "Subversion" for a while. Shortly afterwards, he was a driving force for the establishment of the CCC. Starting in October 1984, this group carried out a series of attacks on political and military targets, until the apprehension of Carette and three other members in a fastfood restaurant in Namur on December 16, 1985.

The CCC-members were brought to trial in 1988. In October 1988, Carette was sentenced to life-long imprisonment^[1], mainly because of an attack on the building of the Union of Belgian Enterprises (VBO) in Brussels on May 1, 1985, which killed two firemen^[2].

On February 23, 2003, Carette was the last CCC-member to be released from prison. In October 2002, he had already given an interview to journalists of the VRT television program "Ter Zake" without permission. In September 2003, he confronted Wilfried Martens in the television program "Nachtwacht"^[3]. Martens was the prime minister of Belgium at the time of the attacks, and even received police protection against the CCC. Carette stated that he still has the same convictions and that his struggle continues^[2].