PARIS (AP) – This time, it was personal: The jailed Venezuelan terrorist known as Carlos the Jackal was ordered Friday to stand trial for allegedly masterminding deadly bombings in France a quarter-century ago to win the release of his girlfriend and an accomplice from police custody.

Carlos, whose real name is Ilich Sanchez Ramirez, will face charges for four attacks in 1982 and 1983 that killed 12 people and injured at least 100. France’s top anti-terrorism Judge Jean-Louis Bruguiere issued the order after a 20-year investigation.

Two Germans and a Palestinian also were ordered to stand trial. No trial date has been set, said a judicial official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media about investigative matters. All four suspects face up to life in prison if convicted.

Ramirez, 57, is serving a life sentence in France for the 1975 murders of two French secret agents and an alleged informer. He gained international notoriety as the Cold War-era mastermind of bombings, killings and hostage dramas, many in Western Europe.

But with the 1982-1983 bombings, Ramirez was driven by a desire to win the release of two jailed radical leftists, Bruno Breguet and Magdalena Kopp, who was his girlfriend at the time, authorities said.

“For Carlos, the 1982 and 1983 bombings were vengeance against the French state,” said Louis Caprioli, a former assistant director of France’s counterterrorism agency DST who now works for the risk management firm Geos. “It became a personal commitment.”

In early 1982, Kopp and Breguet were detained by security guards at a parking lot near the Champs-Elysees in Paris while setting up a car packed with explosives for a bombing attack, Caprioli said.

After their arrest, Ramirez allegedly sent a letter to the French Embassy in the Netherlands threatening violence if the two were not released by March 25, 1982. Four days after the deadline, a bomb hit a train traveling from Paris to Toulouse in southwestern France, killing five people.

That was followed by a car bomb explosion on April 22 – the day Kopp and Breguet went on trial in Paris – outside the Paris offices of the Arab newspaper Al-Watan, which killed one person.

Kopp and Breguet were convicted; she was sentenced to four years in prison and he received five.

Carlos is also suspected in New Year’s Eve blasts on Dec. 31, 1983. An explosion at a Marseille train station killed two people and a bombing of a TGV high-speed train in Tain-l’Hermitage in eastern France killed three.

A group calling itself the Organization for the Arab Armed Struggle claimed responsibility for those attacks in two letters, one of which had Ramirez’ fingerprints on it, judicial officials said.

Kopp and Ramirez were married after she was released from prison and they had a child together, Caprioli said. Breguet disappeared after his release in the mid-1980s.

Ramirez was captured in Sudan in 1994, and whisked in a sack to Paris by French secret service agents. He was convicted three years later and is under investigation for other attacks in France.

Bruguiere’s 20-year investigation into Ramirez ended last year.

In addition to Carlos, he also ordered Germans Christa Froehlich, 64, and Johannes Weinrich, 59, and Palestinian Ali Kamal al-Issawi, 65, to stand trial for alleged roles in separate attacks.

Ramirez’s lawyer and partner, Isabelle Coutant-Peyre, said she would appeal the trial order.

Ramirez is also suspected in the 1976 Palestinian hijacking of a French jetliner en route to Entebbe, Uganda. He has testified that he also led a 1975 attack that killed three people at the OPEC headquarters in Vienna, Austria.

Ramirez has remained vocal from behind bars, and was convicted for saying in a 2004 TV interview that terror attacks are sometimes “legal.” A Paris court later overturned the conviction, saying the remarks were taken out of context.

Weinrich, who once headed European operations for Carlos, is already serving a life sentence for a 1983 attack on a French cultural center in then-West Berlin that killed one man.

Weinrich was charged in Germany with murder for his alleged role in the New Year’s Eve blasts and the Paris car bombing, but judges dropped the case in 2004 after a 17-month trial, saying there was insufficient evidence of his involvement.