Alfa Romeo sports car MI-61741

Alfa Romeo sports car MI-61741 is the rented two-seater that The Jackal used to travel through France before changing its appearance and abandoning it in the woods. Its transformation—from a white Italian car with Italian registration to a badly repainted blue car bearing a fabricated French number—temporarily concealed its connection to him. The disguise did not last: the plates and paint eventually exposed the car’s original identity, and the abandoned vehicle gave Claude Lebel a concrete starting point for searching the countryside.

Identity and role

The car was a white Alfa Romeo sports two-seater hired by The Jackal for his movements in France. When the French external security service informed Claude Lebel that Alexander Duggan had entered France in the car, it supplied the registration as MI-61741. That number linked the vehicle to the name Duggan in the police search, although The Jackal’s entry under that identity was not yet the whole story the investigators needed to establish.

For The Jackal, the car offered speed and mobility, but it also carried identifying details that could be used against him. The hiring and insurance papers related to the white Italian vehicle, not to a blue French-registered car. He recognized that a roadside check could expose the mismatch, particularly if he could not produce the papers. At the same time, once his assumed name had been uncovered, he expected the authorities to trace his point of entry and begin looking for the Alfa Romeo. Its usefulness was therefore temporary: it could carry him toward Corrèze, but it could not safely remain an identifiable white car.

Repainting and concealment

After driving away from Gap by way of Veyne and Aspres-sur-Buech, The Jackal followed the RN93 eastward alongside the Drôme. Near Luc-en-Diois, he left the main road, took a side road into the hills, and then chose a track leading into the woods. There, in the middle of the afternoon, he finished repainting the car a deep, gleaming blue. The work was amateurish and would not withstand close inspection, but he judged that it could pass at a distance, especially in the dusk.

He unscrewed both number plates and turned them over. On their backs he painted an invented French registration ending in 75, the code for Paris, choosing a number that would look commonplace on French roads. The alteration supplied a second layer of disguise: the car no longer presented itself as the white Italian Alfa sought by the authorities, but its new color and plates were convincing only so long as no one inspected them closely. The false appearance also did nothing to make the original hiring and insurance documents match.

The Jackal then weighed the risk of driving in daylight against the time lost by waiting until dusk. He needed to cross roughly 250 miles to Corrèze and find somewhere to lie low; he was several days early for the planned assassination. He chose to drive rather than wait, knowing that the paint might look conspicuously poor in bright sunlight and that a search for the white Alfa could soon intensify. The car served as a hurried bridge between his arrival and the next stage of his plan, not as a durable disguise.

Later, he drove through a forest entrance marked by a private-hunting notice and concealed the car inside a dense clump of wild rhododendron. He had to work beneath it for about an hour to free the steel tubes that had hidden The Jackal’s sniper rifle for the preceding sixty hours. After packing the tubes into a suitcase with old clothes and an army greatcoat, he checked the car for anything that might identify its driver and pushed it into the shrubbery. He cut branches from nearby bushes and jabbed them into the ground across the opening, disguising the vehicle’s tracks and outline. The car was left behind; The Jackal continued on foot with his luggage.

Discovery near Ussel

On the morning of August 20, a gamekeeper named Marcange Caller came upon the car while pursuing a wounded wood pigeon on an estate between Egletons and Ussel. The bird had fallen into the rhododendron and was fluttering on the car’s driving seat. At first, the gamekeeper supposed that a couple of visitors had parked there despite the warning at the entrance. The disguise began to fail when he saw that some branches had been cut and planted in the earth rather than growing there. Cut stumps nearby confirmed that the screen had been made deliberately.

The bird droppings on the seats suggested to him that the car had been there for several days. He took his find back toward the village and intended to mention it to the local constable. The report that eventually reached the commissariat at Ussel described a blue car with French plates—not the white Italian sports car that officials in Paris wanted examined. The difference delayed recognition. The local police arranged for a tow truck, treating the abandoned vehicle as routine work amid staff shortages and a much wider search.

The Alfa did not reach the Ussel pound until after four that afternoon. During an identification check, a maintenance worker noticed how poor the blue paintwork was and scratched at a wing with a screwdriver. White appeared beneath the blue. Examining the plates, he also saw that they had been reversed; when the front plate was turned face up, it displayed MI-61741. The improvised disguise had thus preserved the very evidence needed to connect the abandoned car to the vehicle under investigation.

Consequences for the manhunt

Lebel received the news shortly before six, after Commissaire Valentin at Clermont-Ferrand passed it on. He ordered a team to Ussel and directed it to center a square search on the place where the car had been found. The investigators were to ask at farmhouses, village shops and cafés, hotels, and woodcutters’ huts, looking for a tall, blond Englishman who spoke good French and had been carrying several pieces of luggage. The abandoned Alfa did not reveal The Jackal’s location by itself, but it converted a broad search for a barely known professional assassin into an inquiry anchored to a particular stretch of countryside and a trail of possible sightings.

The instructions also show the car’s double consequence. Its recovery gave the police a lead, but Lebel wanted the investigation kept out of the press and warned that a suspect found hiding somewhere should be surrounded rather than approached. Later, Lebel’s office received word that fingerprints had been taken from the car and from a room at the château; the report described hundreds of matching sets. In the sequence of the manhunt, MI-61741 is therefore less a final identification than a recovered object around which police procedure could gather: the false blue surface concealed its history only until ordinary inspection stripped it away.