A hijacking survivor has been called “the chief of the hijackers” of an Egyptair jet by several other survivors, according to a Maltese Government spokesman. He said the accused 20-year-old man was in satisfactory condition, had given his name as Omar Marzouki and claimed to be Tunisian. The man was being detained by the Maltese authorities and was listed in satisfactory condition at St. Luke’s Hospital here. He has not been charged with any crimes. It was not known if he had given his real name and nationality or was traveling with false papers.
The Maltese Government revised its casualty figures from the hijacking and the storming of the plane downward to 59. On Monday, the authorities said 60 had died. Today, Mr. Mifsud said a 16-month-old child, whose name had not figured on the original list of passengers, had been counted twice in the casualty list. At St. Luke’s Hospital in Valletta, where the surviving passengers are being treated, doctors began performing autopsies on 57 bodies found on the Boeing 737 after it was stormed. The results of the autopsies will be critical in determining how many passengers were killed by the grenades tossed by the hijackers — or the fire and smoke that ensued — and how many died from gunshots from Egyptian troops or the terrorists. Although most surviving passengers interviewed so far have supported the Egyptian raid, some of the same passengers spoke of wild shooting by the commandos.
A car bomb detonated by remote control exploded in Athens as a police bus carrying 22 officers was passing. The blast ripped away one side of the bus, killing one officer and wounding 14, officials reported. No one claimed responsibility for the bombing. The explosion occurred about two hours after about 1,000 anarchists gathered in front of Parliament, demanding the release of 16 people arrested during riots in the Greek capital last week. They also were protesting the death of a teen-ager during the rioting.
An international culture meeting closed today without agreement because of East-West differences, but delegates said it was a success. The delegates said the Budapest Cultural Forum, involving the United States, Canada, the Soviet Union and all European nations except Albania, represented an important step forward in the Helsinki process.
The nearly 40 men and women gathered in a meeting hall here were planning a protest campaign against militarism, the keeping of files on citizens and other vestiges of the dictatorship of Francisco Franco. The beards and jeans might have suggested students or radicals, but the picture on the wall was the giveaway: it was of King Juan Carlos dressed in a police uniform. Ten years after Franco’s death, Spain’s police, once his highhanded enforcers, are angrily demanding to be more a part of democratic Spain. Led by their unions, they have staged barracks sit-ins and petition drives. Last week, nearly 30,000 off-duty police officers joined in marches around the country, chanting, “We want to serve the people.”
The Yugoslav state leadership has warned Prime Minister Milka Planinc’s Government that a worsening economic crisis could start social unrest among the country’s 22 million people, the Yugoslav press agency said today. The eight-member collective presidency delivered its message Monday night at an emergency joint session with the Government, the press agency said. Radovan Vlajkovic, the current President in the rotating system, said inflation, poor export performance and falling living standards were stirring dissatisfaction among Yugoslavs. He was quoted as telling the Planinc Government not to relax economic recovery efforts as it entered the last six months of its mandate. Prime Minister Planinc, 61 years old, who is to step down in May after four years in office, was quoted as pledging that her Government would not relax its efforts. Inflation, running last month at an annual rate of around 75 percent, has bitten deep into living standards as the Government has tried to revive a sluggish economy to meet repayments on a $19 billion foreign debt.
As the two-week synod ended its second working day today, the bishops’ desire to protect and in some cases expand their local authority had become a central topic of discussion. Church leaders are openly acknowledging that serious tensions exist between bishops and the Vatican. Some are insisting that the rights of bishops be safeguarded and even broadened. Bishop James W. Malone of Youngstown, Ohio, president of the National Conference of Bishops in the United States, today defended the role of bishops’ conferences, and other speakers asked for more independence from Rome.
Yelena G. Bonner, the wife of Andrei D. Sakharov, the physicist and rights advocate, arrived here today, evidently en route to the West for medical treatment. Friends said she arrived in the early morning by train from Gorky, the Volga River city of more than a million people to which she and Dr. Sakharov have been banished. Policemen outside the entrance to their Moscow apartment building confirmed that Miss Bonner was there, but they refused to let Western reporters enter. The police have been guarding the vacant sixth-floor apartment ever since she was restricted to Gorky in May 1984, four years after Dr. Sakharov had been banished.
Israel announced that a prominent Palestinian will be appointed mayor of the occupied West Bank city of Nablus. Colonel Efrain Sneh, head of the Israeli administration in the occupied territory, told a news conference that he has approved the appointment of Zafer Masri, 44, head of the Nablus Chamber of Commerce. Masri will be the first new Palestinian mayor in the occupied territories since 1976, when the last direct election was held by local Palestinians. No date for the transfer of power was announced.
King Hassan II elaborated today on terms for holding peace talks with Prime Minister Shimon Peres of Israel, saying that such negotiations could not take place until Israel made it clear it was willing to discuss giving up occupied territories and granting Palestinians self-determination. The King’s statement came a day after he said he was prepared to receive Mr. Peres for talks in Rabat “if he has some serious proposal to make.” In a television interview Monday, King Hassan said that Mr. Peres had asked to be invited to Morocco to talk with the King, who is chairman of the 21-nation Arab League and acted as intermediary in the Egypt-Israel negotiations.
Terry Waite, the Church of England representative seeking the release of American captives in Lebanon, conferred for an hour today with Vice President Bush and other American officials to discuss some ways of winning the hostages’ freedom. “I was able to give him a general briefing on the situation and to indicate some ways in which I felt that this matter could be resolved,” Mr. Waite told reporters later. “I don’t want to be more specific,” he added.
A teenage girl exploded a car bomb at a joint post of Israeli troops and pro-Israeli militiamen in southern Lebanon today, killing herself and causing a number of casualties, Lebanese security sources said. Muslim militia sources said at least 20 Israelis and members of the Israeli-backed South Lebanon Army were killed or wounded in the attack eight miles south of the Christian town of Jezzin.
In Cairo, Egyptian officials accused Libya of being behind the hijacking of the Egyptian airliner. “The connection is very clear,” President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt said at a news conference. The Cairo-bound Egyptair Boeing 737, hijacked after it left Athens on Saturday night, was forced to land in Malta. On Sunday night, it was stormed by Egyptian troops, prompting the hijackers to hurl grenades at the hostages.
The United States has increased its aerial and electronic surveillance of Libya in recent days to monitor any military moves in the aftermath of the hijacking ordeal in Malta, Administration officials said today. The officials said that American forces in the area had been put on alert in case Libya and Egypt became involved in fighting as the result of the hijacking and the subsequent Egyptian storming of the plane. There was no direct American involvement in the rescue operation, which resulted in the death of most of the passengers and crew, the officials said. But one high official said, “We are ready with our forces in the event something nasty occurs.”The officials said that on Sunday, before the Egyptian commando attack, the United States took a number of steps. They said these included:
— Offering to send American counterterrorism forces, the Delta team, to Malta to help carry out the storming of the plane. The request was turned down by President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt.
— Alerting Sixth Fleet ships and deploying Navy reconnaissance planes close to Libya to detect any unusual Libyan military moves against Egypt.
— Sending a counterterrorism specialist from the United States Embassy in Cairo to Malta to be available if needed. The specialist did not play any role in the Egyptian operation.
— Dispatching messages to other governments urging that no haven be given the hijackers.
After the attack, and the resultant large loss of life, President Reagan sent a message to Mr. Mubarak praising him for the action, and expressing strong American support for action against terrorists, a White House official said. Several officials said that the quick American moves to show backing for the Egyptians and the cordial exchange of messages between Cairo and Washington in recent days had indicated that the tension which existed at the time of the Achille Lauro affair last month had passed.
At least eight people have been assassinated in the Afghan capital of Kabul in what appears to be part of a factional conflict within the ruling Communist Party, Western diplomats said in Islamabad, Pakistan. The party is divided between the ruling Parcham group and the dissident Khalq faction in a dispute over how communism should be achieved in Afghanistan.
Tamil separatist guerrillas killed four people in Sri Lanka during the past 24 hours and tied their bodies to lampposts, the national news agency said today. It said the killings took place in northern Jaffna and eastern Batticoloa districts. Security sources said the victims were Tamils who did not support the guerrillas’ fight for a separate Tamil state. The news agency also said guerrillas abducted a Tamil Hindu priest today in Batticoloa area in retaliation for the kidnapping of a Sinhalese Buddhist monk by a rival group on Sunday.
Chinese leaders have summoned an emergency congress of the Communist Youth League in an attempt to quell mounting student protests against Deng Xiaoping’s so-called open door policies. The Communist Party newspaper People’s Daily said today that the youth league will meet in special session on Thursday. Without mentioning the protests, the newspaper said the conference would urge young people to “stand in the forefront” of the changes, and to maintain discipline. The paper also said there would be changes in the leadership of the league’s central committee, suggesting that Mr. Deng has ordered a shake-up in an attempt to get control of the situation. Sudden moves to convene party gatherings have been rare in the orderly political atmosphere of recent years.
The Philippine National Assembly approved a bill that calls for early presidential elections Feb. 7 and a revival of the vice presidency 13 years after it was scrapped by President Ferdinand E. Marcos. The vote was 77 to 41. The president’s ruling party crushed repeated attempts by the opposition to delay the balloting and synchronize it with May 5 polls for provincial and town officials. Opposition assembly members said they will contest the constitutionality of the measure before the Supreme Court.
Bipartisan leaders of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee sent a pointed warning to Philippine President Ferdinand E. Marcos that Congress will base its future dealings with the Manila government on the fairness of next February’s presidential election. A letter signed by Chairman Richard G. Lugar (R-Indiana) cautioned Marcos that a rigged election would be “worse than no election at all” and might cause many Filipinos to “despair of the prospects for peaceful political change” and turn to violence. The letter was also signed by Sens. Claiborne Pell (D-Rhode Island), Frank H. Murkowski (R-Alaska) and Alan Cranston (D-California).
France performs a nuclear test at Mururoa Atoll.
Now that rescue operations from Colombia’s devastating volcanic eruption and mudslides have ended, the major problem facing the authorities is to find permanent housing for the 8,000 survivors. Some aid authorities said they believed the problem might sharpen rather than ease in coming weeks. Nowhere is the problem more acute that in the town of Chinchina, second-hardest hit by the eruption of Nevado del Ruiz, in which about 23,000 people died. Last Wednesday in Chinchina, woodsmoke from cooking fires drifted through lines of laundry drying in the central patio of the School of Immaculate Mary.
Ethiopian and Cuban military experts are training 12,000 Sudanese rebels at a camp in Ethiopia, a senior Sudanese army officer told the official Sudanese news agency. Graduation of the recruits would more than double the strength of the rebel Sudan People’s Liberation Army, according to military attaches. Brigadier Mohammed Zain Abdin, military commander of the Upper Nile area in north Sudan, also said that Ethiopian military helicopters are flying provisions and ammunition to the rebel bases.
South Africa sent a special envoy to neighboring Zimbabwe asking that the black-ruled nation take steps to ensure that nationalist rebels do not stage attacks from its territory. The move came after Pretoria announced that a black farm worker was injured by a land mine planted by suspected rebels of the African National Congress who fled into Zimbabwe. Meanwhile, the South African Supreme Court extended to February 4 an order forbidding police to assault or torture people detained without trial.
The damage in recent spy cases when added to the harm caused by several other major espionage cases appears immense, according to senior American intelligence officials. At the same time, an Administration official warned, “There are more of these cases coming. Don’t think it’s over yet.” He said Vitaly Yurchenko, the Soviet defector who returned to the Soviet Union two weeks ago, provided information that will probably lead to several more arrests. United States intelligence officials said that of the four people arrested since last Thursday on spy charges, Ronald W. Pelton, a former employee of the National Security Agency, appeared on initial assessment to have caused the most harm. He was caught as a result of information provided by Mr. Yurchenko, according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation. While employed as a communications specialist from 1965 to 1979, Mr. Pelton had clearance to use the most heavily classified intelligence, designated sensitive compartmentalized information. Although officials would not describe his job precisely, they said he was in a position to know the capacity of many of the security agency’s highly sensitive satellites and other intelligence-gathering tools.
The two parties will sponsor debates between Presidential candidates in general election campaigns, under an accord signed by the Democratic and Republican national chairmen. The action was recommended by a panel of elected officials, political consultants, news executives, businessmen and lawyers.
President Reagan travels to the Reagan Ranch in California for Thanksgiving.
Congressional budget cuts have forced researchers in the antimissile program to focus on land-based lasers and killer rockets in the quest for a way to destroy attacking nuclear missiles, the director of the program said today. Lieut. Gen. James A. Abrahamson, the director of the Strategic Defense Initiative Organization, told reporters that his office had decided to put less emphasis on more complex weapons, such as lasers based in space and high-powered electromagnetic guns, which the military refers to as “rail guns,” because Congress cut his office’s budget request by $1 billion. General Abrahamson said that in narrowing the field his office had concentrated on programs that had shown the most early promise and those that could be developed most economically. The general said the choices were “premature, I’m sure,” but added, “We didn’t get the money that we needed.”
A bipartisan Commission on National Elections called in Washington for a national registration day as a means of increasing voter participation in presidential elections. “We found that people, not the process, were the things that needed to be fixed,” Republican Co-Chairman Melvin R. Laird, a former defense secretary and White House adviser to President Richard M. Nixon, said at a news conference. “We believe that the President should designate one day of 1988 as a registration day, and we believe it will increase participation of eligible voters by 15% to 20%.”
The space shuttle Atlantis soared into the night sky at Cape Canaveral for a seven-day mission, STS-61-B. The seven-member crew will practice building a large space station. It is the second flight for Atlantis. The blazing trail of the shuttle was visible in a crystal-clear moonlighted sky before disappearing behind a distant cloud bank in the east, about 690 miles from here and eight and a half minutes into the flight. Visible as a glowing spark low in the sky, the shuttle dropped its two solid-fuel booster rockets in full view of delighted spectators. Officials of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration said the seven-member crew, which includes the first Mexican scientist to ride the shuttle, were planning for a busy mission as they travel in a circular orbit 190 miles above the earth.
At some tax-processing centers, taxpayer letters were destroyed, refund checks were mutilated, some people put in 80-hour weeks and tax forms were left in restrooms and on loading docks, the General Accounting Office reported. In reports being distributed on Capitol Hill this week, the GAO, an investigating arm of Congress, pointed to inadequate staffing and a changeover to a new computer system as primary reasons for what Senator John Heinz (R-Pennsylvania) said was “the worst tax-filing season in history.” More than seven months after the April 15 federal income tax filing deadline, the Internal Revenue Service said 1.9 million tax returns remain unprocessed.
The tax revision measure approved by a House committee would bar the use of tax-exempt bonds to finance certain facilities. But more than 30 exceptions to that provision were added to the bill by the panel’s chairman, Representative Dan Rostenkowski, to reward committee members who had backed him or to gain the support of legislators whose help he will need to guarantee adoption of the bill on the House floor.
The opening of the gleaming Fort McHenry Tunnel, which triples the number of Interstate highway lanes through the Baltimore Harbor area, has brought predictions that one of the East Coast’s worst highway traffic bottlenecks will finally be unclogged. The eight-lane $750 million tunnel under the Patapsco River was opened early Sunday, in time for the heavy travel of the Thanksgiving Day weekend. Although the new facility does not shrink distances, the authorities say that motorists will save considerable time in peak periods. The nearby Baltimore Harbor Tunnel, which the Fort McHenry supplements, now handles more than twice the traffic it was designed for in the 1950’s.
A woman who promised to avert a debt-ridden farmer’s eviction said she still plans to buy his land despite her husband’s arrest in Cochran, Georgia, on theft and forgery charges. Melvin Dixon was arrested Monday on warrants issued in Fort Pierce, Florid, three days after he and his wife, Linda, came to Cochran to buy the farm of 66-year-old Oscar Lorick and lease it back at $1 a month.
One of four teenagers shot a year ago by subway gunman Bernhard H. Goetz said in a New York interview that his three companions were trying to rob the slim, bespectacled Goetz and picked him because “he looked like easy bait.” Goetz, charged with attempted murder, is free on bail. Columnist Jimmy Breslin interviewed the brain-damaged Darrell Cabey, 20, in St. Vincent’s Hospital where he is being treated for injuries inflicted by Goetz.
The Rhode Island Supreme Court ruled in Providence that its chief justice, politically scarred by his friendships with reputed mobsters, cannot be removed from the bench this year by majority vote of the state Legislature. The 3-1 opinion by the five-member court came one day after attorneys for Governor Edward DiPrete and Attorney General Arlene Violet argued in a special high court hearing that the seat of Chief Justice Joseph A. Bevilacqua can be vacated. The two-page order did not include an explanation for the justices’ decision. They said that would come later.
The U.S. Government sued Los Angeles officials, charging that a 1982 City Council redistricting plan deprived Hispanic voters of adequate representation. Hispanic people comprise more than 27 percent of the city’s population, according to the department, but have no representation on the 15-member City Council.
A former police chief inspector and two other former police officers were found guilty today of conspiracy and extortion for taking payoffs to protect gambling and prostitution in Philadelphia. A jury found former Chief Inspector Eugene Sullivan 3d, 63 years old, guilty of conspiracy and 14 counts of extortion; former Lieut. Walter McDermott, 48, guilty of conspiracy and 12 counts of extortion, and Robert Schwartz, 42, a former vice squad officer, guilty of conspiracy and seven counts of extortion. The three had been accused of taking more than $300,000 to protect illegal gambling and prostitution.
Eight members of the religious sect, the House of Judah, have been indicted on Federal civil rights charges in the beating death of a 12-year-old boy at the group’s camp, a prosecutor said today The eight members of the group, who call themselves “black Hebrew Israelite Jews,” were accused of trying to make slaves of children at the western Michigan camp through assaults, beatings and intimidation, resulting in the death in 1983 of John Yarbough, the son of a sect member, according to United States Attorney John Smietanka. They were charged with conspiring against the civil rights of a person.
Federal efforts to protect the public from dangerous chemicals and other environmental risks are foundering in a confusing, contradictory and haphazardly administered mire of laws, rules and procedures, according to both proponents and opponents of increased regulation.
Good nutrition in the workplace is spreading as employers, public and private, around the country promote health and fitness programs for all employees.
A biography of Richard Nixon by Edmund Morris will be published by Random House. The publisher’s winning bid, said to have been $3 million and made in a spirited auction involving six other publishers, is believed to be the highest advance ever paid for a single book.
Teenage AIDS victim Ryan White said he feels great and that a state hearing officer’s ruling allowing him back in school in Kokomo, Indiana, in 20 days is “a great present” for his birthday December 6. “It’s a courageous opinion in that it didn’t listen to the fears… and went right to the medical facts,” Ryan’s attorney, Charles R. Vaughan, said at a news conference in Indianapolis. The state hearing officer ruled that Ryan, who suffers from hemophilia, should be allowed to join his classmates when he is well and get home instruction when bedridden. Ryan’s mother, Jeanne White, said she does not think Ryan’s colleagues will shun him when and if he returns to school. It is the parents who are worried, she said. It was not known if school officials will appeal.
[Ed: Sadly, this will NOT be Ryan’s experience in Kokomo. Many families in Kokomo believed his presence posed an unacceptable risk. When White was permitted to return to school for one day in February 1986, 151 of 360 students stayed home. He also worked as a paperboy, and many of the people on his route canceled their subscriptions, believing that HIV could be transmitted through newsprint. The Indiana state health commissioner, Dr. Woodrow Myers, who had extensive experience treating AIDS patients in San Francisco, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention both notified the board that White posed no risk to other students, but the school board and many parents ignored their statements. In February 1986, The New England Journal of Medicine published a study of 101 people who had spent three months living in close but non-sexual contact with people with AIDS. The study concluded that the risk of infection was “minimal to nonexistent,” even when contact included sharing toothbrushes, razors, clothing, combs, and drinking glasses; sleeping in the same bed; and hugging and kissing. When White was finally readmitted in April, a group of families withdrew their children and started an alternative school. Threats of violence and lawsuits persisted. According to White’s mother, people on the street would often yell, “we know you’re queer” at White. The editors and publishers of the Kokomo Tribune, which supported White both editorially and financially, were also ridiculed by members of the community and threatened with death for their actions. White attended Western Middle School for eighth grade during the 1985–1986 school year. He was deeply unhappy and had few friends. The school required him to eat with disposable utensils, use separate bathrooms, and waived his requirement to enroll in a gym class. Threats continued. When a bullet was fired through the Whites’ living room window (no one was home at the time), the family decided to leave Kokomo. After finishing the school year, his family moved to Cicero, Indiana, where he began ninth grade at Hamilton Heights High School, in Arcadia, Indiana.]
Followers of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh reached agreement in principle to sell 82 of the guru’s Rolls-Royces to a Texas car dealer for $5 million in cash. Bob Roethlisberger, owner of European Auto Group in Carollton, a suburb of Dallas, spent two days at Rajneeshpuram, Oregon, negotiating the deal. Sect spokeswoman Ma Prem Bhagwati said the deal was for “$5 million cash in hand.”
A band of wintry weather across the northern part of the nation kept temperatures at record low levels in the West and brought snow and freezing rain in the East. Three people were killed on slick roads in Massachusetts and Nebraska, bringing to 25 the death toll since the bad weather began over the weekend. Travel advisories for freezing rain and occasional snow were in effect over parts of Michigan, New York state and New England.
Dow Jones Industrial Average: 1456.77 (+0.12)
Born:
Matt Carpenter, MLB third baseman, first baseman, and second baseman (All-Star, 2013, 2014, 2016; St. Louis Cardinals, New York Yankees, San Diego Padres), in Galveston, Texas.
Corey Brown, MLB outfielder and pinch hitter (Washington Nationals, Boston Red Sox), in Tampa, Florida.
Jhonny Núñez, Dominican MLB pitcher (Chicago White Sox), in San Jose de las Matas, Dominican Republic.
Lil’ Fizz [Dreux Pierre Frédéric], American rapper and singer (B2K), in New Orleans, Louisiana.
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