Lawyer Isabelle Coutant-Peyre who married Carlos the Jackal dies at 70

French lawyer Isabelle Coutant-Peyre, who defended a string of the world's most notorious criminals including her husband, Venezuelan terrorist Carlos the Jackal, died on Friday aged 70, a relative said.

She died of cancer on Friday morning according to the relative, also a lawyer, confirming a report in the French weekly Marianne.

During her 45-year career, she represented a string of notorious clients including serial killer Charles Sobhraj, known as "the Serpent".

In a 2011 interview, Coutant-Peyre described herself as a "young woman from a good family" in reference to her bourgeois background.

At 21 she married Michel Peyre, deputy mayor from the centre-right UDF party for the Normandy seaside town of Granville. She had three children with him but the couple separated in 1993.

After being sworn in at the bar in 1979 and initially specialising in business law, Coutant-Peyre's career veered after she met Jacques Verges, a high-profile lawyer whose clients included Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie.

"We had a good laugh. We had the same insolence," she said, though she did not consider Verges, who died in 2013, her "mentor".

She later married the world's most wanted terrorist of the 1970s and 1980s, Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, better known as "Carlos the Jackal", after meeting him in a corridor of the Sante prison in Paris in 1997 -- which she described romantically in her 2004 book "Epouser Carlos" (Marrying Carlos).

On 25 August 2001 "we asked for each other's hand in marriage... and he recited the Fatiha, the Koranic profession of faith, to seal this solemn commitment," she said.

Carlos was sentenced to life imprisonment for an attack on Paris' Publicis Drugstore shop in 1974, which killed two and injured 34.

In her eyes, the leftist Venezuelan was like Nelson Mandela -- "not a criminal" but "a politician. A freedom fighter, a revolutionary".

In March 2004, Coutant-Peyre told the France 2 channel that she had "very deep feelings" for Carlos, with whom she shared an "intellectual rapport".

Asked about the difficulty of having a physical relationship with a prisoner, she said: "I have an absolutely ideal husband who leaves me free every night".

mdh-ab/spb/gv/db