Although forbidden from communicating with anyone other than his family and his lawyers, Mr. Ramírez managed to organize interviews last month with a French newspaper and a radio station that were conducted using a smuggled cellphone. In those conversations, the 62-year-old Venezuelan came across as combative and rambling, attacking unspecified “falsifications” in the case against him, though refusing to either admit to or deny the allegations.
“I am not in the habit of making egocentric declarations,” Mr. Ramírez told the newspaper, Libération, when asked whether he was responsible for the bombings. “Nor will I play the prosecution’s pitiful games.”
Mr. Ramírez was placed in solitary confinement after granting the interviews on Oct. 18, prompting him to start a hunger strike in protest of the isolation that prevented him from preparing his defense with his lawyers. That strike ended in late October after he was returned to his regular prison ward in La Santé prison here in Paris, where he regularly crosses paths with another notorious inmate, Manuel Antonio Noriega, the former dictator of Panama, who was convicted last year of money laundering and sentenced to seven years.
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