France a Brutal Game of Blackmail

By Thomas A. Sancton

Hundreds of shoppers were lunching in the self-service cafeteria of a suburban department store near Paris late last week when a bomb had exploded at precisely 12:29 p.m., devastating a 800-sq.-ft. area. Flying glass and debris wounded 41 people, two of them seriously. The blast came only four days after another bomb had ripped through a crowded post office at Paris' city hall, killing one person and wounding 18 others. Amid a wave of minor and apparently unrelated bombings across Western Europe last week, Paris remained the center of a brutal game of terrorist blackmail.

Immediately after the cafeteria blast, about 1,000 people were evacuated from the department store, which is in the shopping complex of La Defense, west of ^ Paris. Interior Minister Charles Pasqua said that police were "actively seeking" a young man with curly black hair who had been seen fleeing the area. The post office bomb earlier in the week exploded only 165 yards from an office used by French Premier and Paris Mayor Jacques Chirac, killing a female postal worker. Chirac rushed to the scene from a meeting and later declared war on "this leprosy of modern times." President Francois Mitterrand called for "combat without mercy" against the terrorist menace.

Although responsibility for the cafeteria attack remained unclear at week's end, Parisians suspected it was the work of the Committee for Solidarity with Arab Political Prisoners. The shadowy, Syrian-oriented terror group has claimed responsibility for the post office explosion and for at least eight other Paris bombings over the past nine months. The attacks have left three people dead and more than 100 wounded. Just a few days before the post office tragedy, the organization took responsibility for planting a 4-lb. bomb aboard a rush-hour commuter train. The device was discovered by a passenger and successfully disarmed.

The group's principal demand is for the release of three terrorists held in French prisons. Of the three, the most important is Georges Ibrahim Abdallah, 35, presumed leader of the Lebanese Armed Revolutionary Factions, who is serving a four-year sentence in Lyons for illegally possessing weapons and false identity papers. Abdallah's fingerprints were also discovered in an apartment found to contain the Czech-made pistol used in the 1982 Paris killings of U.S. Military Attache Charles Robert Ray and Israeli Diplomat Yacov Barsimantov. French authorities, however, say they still lack sufficient evidence to try him in connection with those cases. Persistent rumors that the French might be considering his release have led the U.S to voice its opposition to such a move.

After last week's bombings, any prospects that Abdallah might get out of prison soon dimmed sharply. French public opinion is strongly behind Chirac's call for a war on terrorism. Meanwhile, Paris was bracing for more attacks. After the commuter-train bomb was found, an additional 800 national riot police were assigned to the capital, bringing to 3,300 the number of extra policemen stationed there since February. Reminding the public that police reinforcements alone were not enough to stop the terrorists, Interior Minister Pasqua called on the entire population to "transform themselves into a vast host of vigilant people."

With reporting by Jordan Bonfante and B.J. Phillips/Paris