Red Hands Across the Border

"Is Germany to become the second front of the Algerian War?" the Frankfurter Rundschau demanded. What angered the Rundschau as well as many other Germans was a three-year chain of bombings and killings in West Germany, all unpunished. Most of the victims were Algerian nationalists, or the men who sell them arms for Algeria.

The troubles began in September 1956, when a bomb hidden in a fire extinguisher smashed the office of a Hamburg sporting-goods dealer named Otto Schlueter, killing one man. Schluter's "sporting" weapons, police say, included hand grenades and medium guns bought in Communist Czechoslovakia and destined for Algeria. Schlueter survived that first bomb attempt and a later one that buckled his Mercedes sedan and killed his mother. Frankfurt Gun-Runner Georg Puchert was not so lucky. When he started his Mercedes one morning last March, a bomb exploded squarely under him. Puchert fell dead across the wheel, summoning police by the pressure of his body on the horn.

In Bad Godesberg, Saarbruecken and Cologne, Algerians have been gunned to death in the street. In every case the attackers got away.

Proud Boasts. Last April Frankfurt's Public Prosecutor Heinz Wolf identified the Puchert attack as the work of a French terror organization called the "Red Hand," and added that "it is highly probable that the Red Hand is an undercover section of French counterespionage." The Red Hand's leader, he said, was Jean Viary, 37, onetime inspector in the French Security Police. And one of his two chief assistants, added Wolf, is a Christian

Durieux, a dark, natty, thin-faced Frenchman in his 20s.

Fortnight ago a man identifying himself as Durieux dropped into the Paris office of the London Daily Mail to tell his story. He not only claimed Red Hand credit for all the German cases but others as well, including a dart murder and a knifing in Geneva, a bombing in Rome that injured two children, and ship sinkings in Tangier. Ostend. Antwerp and other harbors. He hinted broadly that the Red Hand was also involved in the still unsolved murders of Tunisian Labor Leader Farhat Hached in 1952 and Algerian Lawyer Ould Aoudia this year.

"These accusations are all true," said the man called Durieux. "The Red Hand is proud to claim them. But we do not exult in murder. Our big regret is that innocent people have sometimes been victims of our counteractivity. But terrorism begets terrorism. The moment the Algerian rebels lay down their arms in complete surrender, the Red Hand will no longer need to exist."

Special Experience. His outfit, Durieux said, finds its membership in the French administration in Algeria, "and in particular, policemen and retired policemen. Above all, there were the Corsicans living in North Africa." Was the French government's Deuxieme Bureau (counterespionage) involved? "I could not comment on the possibility that individual members of the service are in sympathy with us," he said.

Durieux claimed that the Red Hand had promised the French government not to operate on French soil, but the promise still left Germany (where Durieux is wanted for questioning) open to Red Hand activities. Why. asked Frankfurt's influential Allgemeine, has the Bonn government not addressed a stern word of protest to Paris? "There is a limit to what we should be made to endure from our French ally."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.