Call in Beirut Warns of Trial for 5 Americans

A telephone caller claiming to represent a terrorist group that calls itself Islamic Jihad said Monday that the group is holding five missing Americans and plans to put all of them on trial on charges of espionage.

The caller to Western news agencies also said that the group, whose name means Islamic Holy War, was responsible for the killing earlier in the day of two French soldiers serving with a truce observer group in Lebanon.

The two soldiers, who were not identified, were caught in a hail of rifle fire in Borj el Brajne, a primarily Shia Muslim suburb of Beirut. The 68-man French observer force was stationed in Beirut in April to monitor a cease-fire between warring Christian and Muslim militias.

Since April, four French observers have been killed, including the deputy commander of the force, Lt. Col. Claude Cuenot. The anonymous caller said that the two Frenchmen slain Monday were “liquidated” after being caught “spying on our men and positions in the southern suburbs.”

The caller also said that five missing Americans “remain in our custody in preparation for trying them as spies, just like all those spies using their positions in the press, education and religion as a cover while they are no more than CIA agents.”

The missing Americans are Father Lawrence M. Jenco, an American priest kidnaped last week while driving to his office at the Catholic relief services; William Buckley, a U.S. Embassy political officer; the Rev. Benjamin Weir, a Presbyterian minister; Jeremy Levin, Beirut bureau chief of the Cable News Network, and Peter Kilburn, a librarian at the American University of Beirut.

Monday’s caller said that the five “have exploited the hospitality accorded to them by Islamic areas to persist in their subversive activities and will get the punishment they deserve.”

The Americans were kidnaped over the last 10 months in West Beirut, and there have been unconfirmed reports that they were being abducted as potential bargaining chips, to be exchanged for Shia Muslims arrested in Kuwait after bomb attacks there against U.S., French and Kuwaiti installations.