Sudden Death

Bombings rock P.L.O. offices

No one, of course, paid any attention. At about 9 one morning last week, an unidentified man simply parked an automobile in a bustling neighborhood in the southern Lebanese coastal town of Sidon and walked away. Moments later, an explosion ripped through the street, virtually destroying the seven-story regional headquarters of the Palestine Liberation Organization and its leftist Lebanese allies, the 13-party National Movement, where a meeting of officials was due to convene within the hour.

Distraught relatives and rescue workers carried wounded women and children to safety over the scorched and maimed bodies of the dead. The toll: ten guerrillas and 15 innocent bystanders killed, 108 wounded. No well-known guerrilla commanders were among the casualties.

The P.L.O.-National Movement command immediately blamed Israel for the terrorist attack, describing it as "part of the Zionist enemy's policy of continuing genocide against our Lebanese and Palestinian people." The Israelis made no public reply but privately indicated that they had had nothing to do with the bombing. A shadowy group called the Front for Liberating Lebanon from Foreigners claimed that it had engineered the assault. The group took responsibility for a second bombing that occurred almost simultaneously in the northern Lebanese town of Chekka, where an explosion outside a cement factory said to be owned by P.L.O. and Syrian sympathizers killed ten and wounded ten more. A day later, a third explosion killed two and injured several more in the low-income Beirut suburb of Bourj-el-Barajneh, a P.L.O. stronghold; the Front also claimed to have been behind that bombing.

Little is known about the Front, other than that it is a right-wing group strongly opposed to both the Syrian and P.L.O. presences in Lebanon. In August 1980 the Front took responsibility for the botched assassination attempt on John Gunther Dean, the U.S. Ambassador to Lebanon.

The fact that so little is known about the Front, and the question of whether or not it really is responsible for the bombings, are measures of the chaos that prevails in Lebanon. Police and security forces, for example, still have no idea who killed French Ambassador Louis Delamare on Sept. 4, nor do they know any reason for the assassination.

Lebanon had been relatively quiet since July 24, when U.S. Special Envoy Philip Habib helped to arrange a de facto cease-fire between Israel and the P.L.O. But last week, in addition to the bombings, there were other ominous rumblings. Israeli jets flying routine reconnaissance missions over Beirut and southern Lebanon were fired upon by the P.L.O., and Israeli military officials charged that the Palestinians were moving new military equipment into the south in violation of the ceasefire. The cauldron of Lebanon seemed set to begin boiling yet again.

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