House where Carlos the Jackal first struck faces the bulldozer

In the pocket of his green army surplus parka he carried a 9mm Beretta pistol. His name was Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, better known as Carlos the Jackal, and he was about to carry out his first assassination attempt in a murderous career that would span 20 years.

Now, 34 years after he shot Joseph Edward Sieff, the president of Marks & Spencer and honorary vice-president of the British Zionist Federation, the house where it happened may be demolished.

Plans have been lodged with Camden council to knock down the property and build a modern family home - complete with swimming pool, games room and servants' quarters - in its place.

As a prominent member of London's Jewish community, 68-year-old Sieff knew he was a potential target for Palestinian terrorists and had been warned to look out for booby-trapped mail. What he was not expecting was for his would-be killer to brazenly walk up to his front door.

When the Portuguese butler opened the door, the Jackal pointed the gun at him and said in a quiet voice: "Take me to Sieff."

From the landing Sieff 's wife Lois saw him pushing the butler up the stairs. She rushed back into her bedroom, closed the door and phoned the police.

Sieff was in the bathroom getting ready for dinner when the Jackal shot him in the face from 3ft away.

He fell to the ground unconscious and Sanchez stood over his body to finish him off. But the gun jammed and the young Venezuelan terrorist was forced to flee.

By the time the police turned up - just two minutes after the 999 call - he had disappeared. Sieff survived and, although it was an inauspicious start to the Jackal's career as a killer, he went on to be responsible for dozens of deaths on behalf of the most feared terrorist group of the time, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

Nicknamed after Frederick Forsyth's book The Day Of The Jackal, which was said to have been found in his Bayswater flat by police, Sanchez was involved in a string of terrorist outrages, including the seizing of the French embassy in the Hague, the bombing of an Israeli bank in London and a grenade attack on a crowded Paris café.

He also carried out a bazooka attack on an El Al Boeing jet at Paris Orly airport in 1975 and shot dead two French agents who had gone to his Paris flat after a tipoff from Mossad, the Israeli intelligence service.

His most spectacular coup was the 1975 attack on the headquarters of Opec, the organisation of oil-producing states, in Vienna in which three people were killed as his team of guerrillas took control of the offices and kidnapped 11 ministers.

In 1994, he was captured in Sudan by French counter-terrorism agents. Three years later he was sentenced to life imprisonment by a Paris court. The 58-year-old is currently in France's Clairvaux prison.