Major Slain Taking Photos Through Window: Soviets : Sentry Acted Properly, They Insist

The Soviet Union, in an official statement on the killing of a U.S. Army officer in East Germany, said today that a Soviet sentry shot him after he opened the window of a restricted Soviet installation and began taking pictures.

The official Soviet press agency Tass said that the sentry acted properly and that responsibility for the death “lies fully on the American side.”

Secretary of Defense Caspar W. Weinberger, in Luxembourg for a NATO meeting, said the shooting of Maj. Arthur D. Nicholson Jr. was “totally unjustified.”

Nicholson, 37, of West Redding, Conn., was shot Sunday by a sentry at a Soviet installation in Ludwigslust, East Germany, 85 miles northwest of Berlin. A Russian linguist, Nicholson was the first member of the U.S. Military Liaison Mission in East Germany to be killed in the line of duty by Soviet troops.

Points Not Contested

The Soviet Union has not contested the U.S. statement that Nicholson and his driver, Sgt. Jessie Schatz, were unarmed and that the major was shot in the chest. The United States has not disputed the Soviet statement that Nicholson was photographing the Soviet base.

Tass said Nicholson and Schatz entered a restricted Soviet installation despite signs--in German and Russian--saying the area was off limits.

Nicholson then left the car and “secretly” approached a storage facility and opened its window, Tass said. He was taking photographs through the window when he was discovered by a guard.

“Acting in strict compliance with military regulations, the sentry demanded in Russian and German that the stranger stop,” Tass said in its first comment on the incident.

‘Fired Warning Shot’

“When the latter failed to comply and tried to flee, the sentry fired a warning shot into the air. Since the intruder did not stop even after this, the sentry had to use his weapon. He fired and killed the intruder,” Tass said.

It said Schatz was “apprehended by Soviet servicemen.” He was returned unharmed to the U.S. military mission at Potsdam, an East German city adjacent to West Berlin.

“The tragic outcome of what happened on March 24 is regrettable, but the entire responsibility for it lies fully on the American side, which is now circulating a deliberate false version of what happened,” Tass said.

Weinberger, however, charged that Nicholson was in an area in which he was permitted under a 1947 treaty and was shot without warning. And U.S. officials said Soviet soldiers denied him medical help for an hour while he lay dying. (Story on Page 9.)

‘Totally Unjustified’

“We are convinced the shooting of the major in East Germany was a totally unjustified act,” Weinberger said. “He was entirely in a place where it was agreed observers can go.”

Col. Michael Burch, a spokesman for Weinberger, contrasted the shooting of Nicholson with the treatment of three Soviet observers arrested by U.S. troops at a U.S. facility in West Germany earlier this month. They were turned over to German authorities, who escorted them to their base at Frankfurt.

Burch also said some Soviet officers were detained for taking pictures during a North Atlantic Treaty Organization exercise in January but were returned peacefully to their unit in Frankfurt.

“Our view is that you take their camera away and you send them home,” Burch said. “You don’t shoot unarmed soldiers.”

Tass, however, said U.S. intelligence officers fleeing guards after a similar operation at another Soviet installation in East Germany in 1983 “ran down a Soviet army officer, inflicting grievous bodily harm to him.”