An international investigation of a midair explosion aboard a Trans World Airlines jet turned today to the possibility that a known Arab terrorist had planted a bomb aboard the plane. This line of inquiry by Greek, Italian, American and Egyptian investigators became known after Italy’s Interior Minister told reporters that “a suspect, known as a terrorist,” boarded the Boeing 727 on Wednesday at its point of origin in Cairo and got off in Athens, the first stop. The airliner then flew on to Rome, where it picked up passengers for the return flight to Athens. The Italian Interior Minister, Oscar Luigi Scalfaro, offered no details. But the Greek security police said they “accepted the Italian evidence.” The Greek police and an airline official said a woman carrying a Lebanese passport and identified in one account as May Mansour had been on the Cairo-Athens leg and had later changed to a Middle East Airlines plane for Beirut. There was no direct flight from Cairo to Beirut on Wednesday. The authorities said the woman was given seat 10F, the spot where the explosion is said to have occurred hours later. The implication seemed to be that she planted the bomb. The explosion, which occurred as the plane was descending toward Athens from an altitude of more than 10,000 feet, killed four Americans and injured nine others. Although the blast blew a hole nine by three feet in the fuselage, the pilot landed safely in Athens.
The President deplored the bombing aboard the airliner as a “barbaric action of wanton international terrorism.” Mr. Reagan said no individual, group or country had been ruled out as the assailant. Larry Speakes, White House spokesman, said that despite denials by Colonel Muammar el-Qaddafi on Wednesday that Libya was involved, he was viewed as a suspect. “We’ve seen statements by Mr. Qaddafi before, and we do not yet know who is responsible,” Mr. Speakes told reporters. “But in view of his past record, his denials, by themselves, mean nothing.”
Tour operations and travel representatives yesterday reported a scattering of canceled Mediterranean bookings but no abrupt response to Wednesday’s suspected terrorist bombing of a Trans World Airlines jet over Greece. Some noted, however, that fear of terrorism as well as the weakening dollar had already taken a considerable toll of overseas travel plans and that many travelers had rearranged their itineraries or decided to stay home. Spokesmen for T.W.A., Alitalia and Olympic Airways said Europe-bound flights out of New York had been departing with near-normal passenger loads the last few nights. But Craig Pavlus, T.W.A’s vice president of sales and reservations, said the carrier had recently seen a marked shift in tour bookings from the Mediterranrean to northern Europe.
Libyan dissidents appear to have closed ranks behind Colonel Muammar el-Qaddafi, at least temporarily, in a show of nationalism against a foreign threat. Nonetheless, the Libyan leader is protected by extraordinary security. Observers say he always wears a bulletproof vest, even under casual clothes at home.
Airport security in Cairo, where a suspect in Wednesday’s midair bombing may have boarded a Trans World Airlines jet, is regarded as mediocre by security experts, Government and airline officials said yesterday. But the experts were said to believe that even the best screening system now in use cannot guarantee that a determined terrorist team will be prevented from sneaking a bomb aboard an airliner being prepared for flight. An Egyptian Government spokesman yesterday rejected as silly and unfounded any allegations that the explosives were put aboard the T.W.A. plane in Cairo. While the airports at Rome and Athens have been surveyed by an international team within the last year, the last similar inspection of security at Cairo apparently was made two years ago. At that time, it was judged to have met the standards recommended by the International Civil Aviation Organization.
The United States plans to carry out an underground nuclear test soon, perhaps as early as April 8, Administration officials said today. The test, which has not been officially announced, could prompt the Soviet Union to end its eight-month-old moratorium on testing. The Reagan Administration has invited the Soviet Union to send a team of experts to evaluate the size of an American test, code-named Jefferson, during the third week in April. But Administration officials said today that there would be an American detonation before the planned Jefferson test. The Soviet Union first imposed a moratorium on underground nuclear tests, the only kind of testing now permitted under existing treaties, last August 6 and urged the United States to follow suit. The Soviet moratorium was originally to last through the end of 1985, but Moscow later extended it through the end of March. Since then, Mikhail S. Gorbachev, the Soviet leader, has said that the Soviet Union would maintain its moratorium after March as long as the United States did not conduct a test.
Two panels of American and Western European experts said today that a Soviet-American test ban treaty would go a long way toward curbing the spread of nuclear weapons. After three years of study, the two panels agreed in separate reports that a complete halt in testing would create pressure on other countries to sign such an accord. Without testing, the specialists said, nonnuclear countries would have difficulty developing weapons. The study by the U.S.-based Council on Foreign Relations and the Centre for European Policy Studies also said there is a “clear and present” risk that additional nations, chiefly Pakistan, will acquire nuclear weapons. It called for “sensible… action, but not for doomsday panic.”
Negotiators at the Geneva conference on disarmament have reached a preliminary agreement on commercial chemicals that would be included in a proposed treaty banning the production, storage and use of chemical weapons, United States officials said today. The agreement on a preliminary list of chemicals, including those that could be used for both weapons and commercial applications, comes amid what United States officials called a “slight increase” in Soviet participation in technical discussions on verification at the talks in Geneva. But United States and other Western diplomats cautioned that the preliminary agreement and new Soviet activity could only be characterized as a small step forward in the longstanding talks on chemical weapons and that the Soviet Union had yet to provide any new, concrete proposals for resolving the more difficult questions of verification and eliminating stockpiles. The 40-nation Geneva conference has been seeking a chemical weapons accord since 1968, but has repeatedly been stymied due to disagreement primarily between the Soviet Union and the United States on such issues.
Bruno Kreisky, the former Chancellor of Austria, today criticized Kurt Waldheim, the former United Nations Secretary General who is running for President, for decades of silence on his wartime activities and said Austria needs a head of state who is above reproach. The statement was a marked departure because Mr. Kreisky, a Socialist whose party opposes Mr. Waldheim’s candidacy, has been outspokenly critical of Mr. Waldheim’s accusers. He had spoken particularly harshly of the World Jewish Congress, which along with several newspapers has publicized documents it says implicate Mr. Waldheim in Nazi atrocities during World War II on the Balkan front. As Chancellor, Mr. Kreisky recommended Mr. Waldheim for the post of Secretary General, which Mr. Waldheim held from 1972 to 1981.
The world’s largest advertising agency, Young & Rubicam, canceled its contract with former U.N. Secretary General Kurt Waldheim because of allegations that he had a role in Nazi war crimes during World War II. The New York-based firm, which has many Jewish clients, told its office in Austria that it will no longer be in charge of political advertising for Waldheim, who is running for the largely ceremonial post of Austrian president. The contract cancellation came just one day after the New York-based World Jewish Congress released additional documents in support of earlier charges that Waldheim was a senior officer on the staff of a Nazi war criminal.
The Italian police arrested six people today in connection with the illegal adding of methyl alcohol to wine. The police said that a wine producer named Antonio Fusco, 54 years old, was arrested at Manduria near Taranto today on charges of selling wine containing illegally high amounts of methanol, a wood-based alcohol. They said five other men were arrested in northern Italy on charges of mixing the chemical with wine, or distributing brands that contained the illicit mixture. The hunt for adulterated brands that killed 15 people widened from northern Italy to the far south.
Spain’s Foreign Minister said today that his government would not grant asylum to Ferdinand E. Marcos despite requests from Washington to do so. The refusal by the Spanish official, Francisco Fernandez-Ordonez, came after a meeting with President Corazon C. Aquino of the Philippines. The decision further complicates the personal situation of former President Marcos, who is said to be especially anxious to find a haven from lawsuits against him in the United States.
The United States promised to consider a proposal by Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres for the formation by industrial nations benefiting from falling oil prices of a $25 billion to $30 billion development fund for the Middle East. But a State Department spokesman said that while the United States supports the proposal’s goals, there are “potential political and financial obstacles” to such a program.
Egyptian Attorney General Mohammed Guindy filed charges ranging from murder to insubordination against 1,236 defendants — 1,205 policemen and 31 civilians — for participating in rioting near the Great Pyramids that left 70 people dead. He blamed the February outbreak in part on the torture and abuse of police conscripts by their superiors. The rioting erupted at a camp for the conscripts after a rumor started that the draftees’ service would be extended by a year.
Afghan peace negotiations, broken off last August, will resume May 5 in Geneva, U.N. Undersecretary General Diego Cordovez announced. The key issue, a timetable for the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Afghanistan, will be back on the table for discussion by Pakistani and Afghan delegations. However, the Pakistanis said the resumed talks will still be conducted as “proximity talks,” as they have been for the past five years, in which the U.N. mediator meets separately with the two sides.
Indian guru Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, who was expelled from the United States and Greece and barred from Britain, has applied for permanent residence in Uruguay. Luis Rua Oza, Uruguay’s national immigration director, said that the 54-year-old Rajneesh entered the country two weeks ago on a 90-day tourist visa. Rua Oza said Rajneesh told immigration officials he has already deposited $10,000 in a Montevideo bank and will be supporting himself on income from investments.
Deputy Prime Minister Li Peng said at a news conference today that Chinese officials had discussed nuclear power cooperation at a meeting with Soviet officials in Peking last month and that a Chinese delegation would go to the Soviet Union soon to study nuclear power stations. Cooperation with the Soviet Union on nuclear power technology “is not on the agenda yet,” Mr. Li said, adding that “it will be decided after study by the group” going to the Soviet Union. Vice Premier Li Peng also disclosed at an unusual two-hour press conference that China is cutting back on its anticipated purchase of foreign nuclear equipment and reactors, raising doubts about the prospects for multibillion-dollar nuclear sales to China by some Western companies.
Defense Secretary Caspar W. Weinberger arrived in Japan tonight after attending security talks in South Korea, where he warned of an increased threat to that country as it prepares to hold the 1988 Olympics. With Seoul also preparing to hold the Asian Games this year, Mr. Weinberger and the South Korean Defense Minister, Lee Ki Baek, issued a communique today that said “their two countries must remain specially vigilant during the period leading up to the 1988 Olympics.”
A high-ranking American official said today that the United States intended to increase military and economic assistance to Haiti and to help it recover some of the vast riches stolen from the country by the Duvalier Government. The official, Elliott Abrams, Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs, made the announcement at the end of a two-day visit here. He was accompanied by Brigadier General Fred Gorden, director of the Inter-American region at the Defense Department. Two Months of Stagnation The visit appeared to reflect the growing United States concern with the stability of this impoverished Caribbean nation of six million people. Haiti has remained politically and economically stagnant in the two months since the flight February 7 of President Jean-Claude Duvalier.
The Reagan Administration today denied assertions by a senior Honduran official that the United States had deliberately exaggerated the seriousness of Nicaragua’s recent border raid, and had pressed Honduras to ask for $20 million in emergency aid. Both the White House and the State Department said the statements by the unidentified Honduran “come as a surprise to us, especially in view of their deviation from the facts and from the public and private position of the Honduran Government.” The Ambassador in Honduras, John Ferch, was instructed to seek “a clarification” from President Jose Azcona about the allegations. A State Department official said later that Mr. Azcona had told Mr. Ferch that the statements made by the senior official had not been cleared by him.
Diplomats and military officers said this week that they doubted whether the acquisition of advanced antiaircraft weapons by the Nicaraguan rebels would be sufficient to turn the tide of battle in their favor. The Reagan Administration, which has decided to give surface-to-air Stinger missiles to the Afghan and Angolan rebels, is also known to be eager to send them to the rebels fighting to overthrow the Nicaraguan Government. Congress is considering an Administration request to provide $100 million in military and nonmilitary aid to the rebels. Some Administration officials have said that if Congress approves the aid, as it is expected to do, antiaircraft weapons will be part of the military aid sent to the rebels, who are known as contras.
Talks on setting up an interracial legislature for one of South Africa’s four provinces opened in Durban today, but major anti-apartheid groups refused to take part. The talks, convened under heavy security, centered on the possible formation of a joint legislative body to govern Natal Province and the so-called black homeland of KwaZulu, which lies inside Natal’s boundaries. South Africa’s largest anti-apartheid coalition, the United Democratic Front, has condemned the Natal talks, as has the outlawed African National Congress. Meanwhile, Britain today rejected calls from Bishop Desmond M. Tutu for sanctions against Pretoria, saying trade boycotts would only hinder political reforms and moves toward ending apartheid.
A top space agency official testified today that there were major flaws in the management of the space shuttle program in the months leading up to the explosion of the Challenger. The official, Arnold Aldrich, testified that although he was head of the entire shuttle program, he was never informed of the issues being raised about the safety of joints in the booster rockets in months of discussions among engineers from the company that built the rockets and from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration itself. A failure in those joints is believed to have caused the Challenger disaster January 28, in which the crew of seven astronauts died. Mr. Aldrich, who is based at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, said the joints’ problems had been discussed at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, and at NASA headquarters in Washington, but the problems were “not brought through my office in either direction.” According to the shuttle program’s organizational charts, Mr. Aldrich is the manager of the national shuttle program. The Marshall center, which is responsible for the booster rockets, was supposed to report major problems to him. “I believe that is a critical breakdown in the process,” Mr. Aldrich told the Presidential commission investigating the Challenger disaster.
The concerns expressed by Mr. Aldrich were echoed by Richard P. Feynman, a member of the commission, who described NASA’s process for dealing with safety issues as “Russian roulette,” and by the testimony of four astronauts, who told the commission they were never told that the critical seals in the booster rockets were considered a major safety problem. They said they might have insisted that the seals be fixed had they been more aware of the problem. The astronauts, however, were generally supportive of the shuttle program and their criticisms were far more muted than concerns previously expressed by some astronauts in internal memorandums or interviews. None of the astronauts expressed fear of flying the shuttle or called for curtailing the shuttle program. Mr. Aldrich said there were at least three additional breakdowns in communication that helped prevent him from learning of the joint problems. He reiterated his previous statements that he was never informed on the day of the launching that the night before, engineers from Morton Thiokol Inc., which builds the booster rockets, had warned officials from the Marshall Center that the joints might not perform properly in the cold weather. Then he spoke of two other communications failures. Because budget items to fix the booster joints did not routinely pass through his office, he said, he was unaware that the problem existed and that funds were being expended to try to fix it. Moreover, the “flight readiness reviews” to address safety issues consistently treated the joint problems as of only “limited concern” or even “not a concern,” he said.
Dr. Feynman, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, said that typically in flight readiness reviews, conducted a week or two before launchings, space agency officials would “agonize whether they can go” even though the seals might have eroded on the previous flight. But then, if they decided to launch and the flight succeeded, he said, on the next flight they lowered their standards a bit because they “got away with it the last time.” He described the process as “a kind of Russian roulette” or a “perpetual movement heading for trouble.” In an effort to focus more concerted attention on safety issues, several members of the commission indicated that they would probably recommend a new organization within NASA that could detect safety problems and try to get them resolved, free from the pressures to hold costs down or maintain the launching schedule. William P. Rogers, chairman of the commission, said the group was considering “some kind of independent safety panel.” Dr. Feynman said that “what’s missing” now is a safety board that can “ride herd on safety problems and get them resolved.”
The U.S. national debt hits $2,000,000,000,000.
President Reagan spends much of the afternoon clearing brush around the ranch.
Michael K. Deaver, former deputy chief of White House staff, is being investigated for his role as adviser to the Canadian government on acid rain, the General Accounting Office said. Deaver, who resigned last year to form his own Washington consulting firm, is legally barred as a former senior official from conducting business with the White House for one year. The GAO investigation centers on whether there is any connection between Deaver’s work on the acid rain issue while he was at the White House, his contract with the Canadian government and his influence, if any, in the Administration’s agreement with Canada last month on dealing with acid rain.
The American Civil Liberties Union sued the Commission on Pornography headed by Attorney General Edwin Meese III, accusing the panel of violating federal law by withholding from the public drafts and working papers that will be used in preparing its final report. The U.S. District Court suit in Washington seeks to enjoin the commission from conducting any business until it agrees to release the documents.
The three Federal agencies that regulate commercial banks will ask Congress next week for broad powers to let troubled banks be bought by sound banks in other states. Responding to a crisis among Texas, Oklahoma and Louisiana banks that have lent heavily to the oil and gas industry, the agencies are working on a joint appeal to Congress to relax Federal restrictions on interstate banking nationally. Regulators worry that a multibillion-dollar bank with extensive energy loans might fail, causing a crisis similar to the 1984 collapse of the Continental Illinois Bank and Trust Company. The proposed change would create an opportunity for big, healthy banks to expand into new areas. But top regulators said today that interstate banking is not the aim in itself but only a means of dealing with the severe problems caused by the collapse of oil prices.
Republicans are counting heavily on holding Senate seats in three Southern states in contests that could be among the most hard-fought and significant of the 1986 campaign year. One of the freshman Senators, Paula Hawkins of Florida, is considered to be in political jeopardy against her popular Democratic challenger, Governor Bob Graham. The two others, Jeremiah Denton of Alabama and Mack Mattingly of Georgia, are viewed as less vulnerable.
Protests on the University of California Berkeley campus against the school’s investments in concerns that do business with South Africa led to the arrest of 87 students early today. The incident, in which the 87 were removed from “shantytowns” they had built on the campus to symbolize the plight of South African blacks, was the latest in a series this week in which more than 150 people have been arrested. After the clash today, 11 demonstrators were reported taken to hospitals with minor injuries and 18 police officers said they had been injured.
A man who was months behind in his rent shot and killed his landlord and a police officer, then took an elderly neighbor hostage and barricaded himself in an apartment, authorities said. More than 50 police officers surrounded the wood-frame, two-flat residence on Chicago’s North Side where the gunman was barricaded. A police negotiator was sent to talk with the gunman, described as “a huge male …300 pounds, aged 50 to 55,” said police Superintendent Fred Rice.
A judge stayed a $100,000 fine and a suspended prison term that he gave the executive editor of the Providence Journal while the Rhode Island newspaper appeals his contempt finding for violating a gag order on a story. The appeal came a day after U.S. District Judge Francis J. Boyle fined the newspaper and gave Charles Hauser an 18-month suspended prison term. The newspaper defied a temporary restraining order Boyle issued in November to bar publication of a story on the late reputed New England crime boss Raymond L. S. Patriarca.
Reputed New England crime underboss Gennaro J. Angiulo was sentenced to 45 years in prison and ordered to pay a $120,000 fine for racketeering and other crimes at his Boston trial. Three of his brothers, Francesco, Donato and Michele Angiulo, and an alleged associate, Samuel Granito, received sentences of three to 25 years. Gennaro Angiulo was the reputed deputy to the late alleged crime boss Raymond L. S. Patriarca.
Election officials must recount write-in ballots in a pivotal ward race in which an ally of Chicago Mayor Harold Washington holds a narrow lead, a judge ordered today. The Washington ally, Luis Gutierrez, leads his 26th Ward opponent, Manuel Torres, by 20 votes in unofficial tallies from the election March 18. A Gutierrez victory could give Mayor Washington a majority in the City Council. Mr. Gutierrez and Mr. Torres each got 50 percent of the vote: 5,245 for Mr. Gutierrez, 5,225 for Mr. Torres, the elections board said. An aldermanic candidate must receive 50 percent of the vote plus one to avoid a runoff. If write-in candidates got 20 votes or more, a runoff would be required.
A team of surgeons at Barnes Hospital in St. Louis worked Thursday night to transplant a new heart into a Missouri man who last month was given the heart of a mismatched donor because of human error in matching blood types. Hospital spokeswoman Daisy Shepard said the 47-year-old man, who has requested anonymity, was being given the heart from a donor in Billings, Mont. A retrieval team from Barnes flew to Montana to remove the heart from the deceased donor, Shepard said. An Air Force jet then flew the team and the heart back to St. Louis.
Sexually transmitted infections that threaten women’s fertility pose a little-known but major health threat, with costs totaling more than $2.6 billion in 1984 and likely to exceed $3.5 billion in 1990, government scientists reported. The researchers, led by Dr. A. Eugene Washington of the national Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, said that pelvic inflammatory disease can lead to chronic pain, infertility or internal scars. At least 1 million U.S. women get the disease each year. The findings appear today in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
The Department of Agriculture acknowledged today that it had granted a Nebraska company the world’s first license to market a living, genetically altered virus, and scientists in and out of the Government questioned whether it had followed guidelines intended to safeguard the public. The virus, used as a vaccine to prevent a herpes disease in swine, was field-tested last fall in three states, the first product of genetic engineering to be released into the environment. The department said it had given permission for field testing the virus and acknowledged that the states did not know for some months that genetically altered organisms were involved in the tests. The department granted a marketing license on Jan. 16 for the vaccine, which is being sold as Omnivac in major swine-producing states in the Middle West and South by the Biologics Corporation, an animal health care company based in Omaha.
Since his emergence from obscurity two weeks ago, Lyndon H. LaRouche Jr. has used his newfound prominence to promote his extremist theories, clearly relishing the national attention that Democratic leaders hope will destroy his chances of mainstream support. The upset victories of two LaRouche candidates in last month’s Illinois Democratic primary have brought him a barrage of national attention unlike anything his movement has experienced in its 20-year odyssey from the far left to its present eccentric positions, which defy description in conventional political terms. Building on that attention, Mr. LaRouche, a self-proclaimed economics expert who has gained a tiny percentage of the vote in three Presidential candidacies, hopes with his followers to retail his philosophy to farmers, blue-collar workers and members of minority groups. Democratic leaders, stunned by the Illinois results, say they believe voters cast their ballots unaware of the candidates’ connections to Mr. Larouche and such LaRouche beliefs as that the Queen of England is a drug dealer and that Henry A. Kissinger is a Soviet “agent of influence.” “Their nominations were not the result of voting by an informed electorate,” a recent memorandum from the Democratic National Committee said.
Maureen O’Boyle (future host of “A Current Affair”) is raped in Macon, Georgia. The rapist had broken into her apartment and attacked her. The man was arrested after committing a second rape and sentenced to 50 years in prison. In 1992, O’Boyle told People Magazine, “I’ve always thought that being in a job where I am in the public eye that my story is important to share.”
Air tankers dumped water on a fire that jumped a barrier in the national forests of Virginia yesterday as firefighters across the Southeast worked to halt blazes that have burned more than a half-million acres this year. Rain is not forecast in most areas until the weekend. Gov. Lamar Alexander of Tennessee authorized a $2,000 reward for the arrest and conviction of arsonists.
IBM introduced the 5140 “Convertible.” It weighed 12 lbs., listed at $1,995, and had a grand total of 256K Random Access Memory, or “RAM.” It was considered a big improvement over its predecessor, the giant IBM Portable PC 5155, which was introduced in 1984. That model, which was much bulkier, had a handle on it, giving it “portability.”
The Board of Regents of the University System of Georgia today released a special report that showed a pattern of academic abuse in the admission and advancement of student-athletes at the University of Georgia for the last four years. The report concluded that the preferential academic treatment was given because of pressure from the athletic department, headed by Vince Dooley, who is also the football coach. The report also said the university officers who had admitted authorizing the academic exceptions said they had acted with the knowledge of the university’s president, Dr. Fred C. Davison. It is thought to be the first time that a university president has been so directly implicated in a system of preferential treatment for athletes. Although such treatment has been rumored at many schools many times, this is the first time it has been documented through an official investigation.
Less than a week after he was released by the Yankees, two days after he became 47 years old and just before he would have become a free agent, Phil Niekro, the oldest player in the majors, was back in business yesterday, agreeing to a one-year contract with the Cleveland Indians. Not so with Pedro Guerrero of the Dodgers. With opening day only four days away, Guerrero was put out of commission for at least three months after suffering a severe knee injury while sliding during an exhibition game. Niekro, the veteran knuckleball pitcher who has won 300 games in his 22-year career, was claimed on waivers by the Indians, who plan a news conference tomorrow at their training camp in Tucson, Arizona.
The stock market fell broadly yesterday, with the Dow Jones industrial average dragged down 28.86 points by several large sell programs. The Dow ended at 1,766.40 as other indicators also lost ground. The Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index closed 3.24 points lower, at 232.47, while the New York Stock Exchange composite index dropped 1.67 points, to 134.41.
Dow Jones Industrial Average: 1766.4 (-28.86)
Born:
Amanda Bynes, American actress (“The Amanda Show”, “What I Like About You”), in Thousand Oaks, California.
Coleen Rooney, English media personality (married to Wayne Rooney), in Liverpool, England, United Kingdom.
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