The Day of The Jackal - Future Influences

Future Influences

• A copy of the Hebrew translation of The Day of the Jackal was found in possession of Yigal Amir, the extreme-right militant who assassinated Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin on November 4, 1995. As published in the Israeli press at the time, police investigators believed that the assassination was partially inspired by the book, and that Amir used it as a kind of "how to" manual. However, the method of assassination employed by the novel's Jackal is quite different from Amir's murder of Rabin. In particular, the Jackal intended to kill DeGaulle with a high-powered rifle at long range. Amir shot Rabin nearly point-blank with a handgun.
• Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, AKA "Carlos" was nicknamed "The Jackal" by the press after a reporter with The Guardian newspaper erroneously reported that the novel was found among the terrorist's possessions (which were with his friend Angela Otaola in London).
• The method for acquiring a false identity and UK passport detailed in the book is often referred to as the "Day of the Jackal fraud" and remains a well known security loophole in the UK. The technique was most recently used by John Darwin to obtain a new passport after he faked his own death in a canoeing accident.
• Would-be assassin Vladimir Arutinian, who attempted to kill US President George W. Bush during his 2005 visit to the country of Georgia, was an obsessive reader of the novel and kept an annotated version of it during his planning for the assassination.
• The New Zealand Member of Parliament David Garrett claimed the novel's description of identity theft inspired him to create his own fake passport as a "youthful prank". The incident further inflamed a national controversy over the law and order campaigner's criminal history.