Libyan Plot to Bomb U.S. Embassy Told

Egypt foiled a Libyan plot to blow up an embassy with a truck bomb, the government said Thursday. The target was not named by authorities, but a government-owned newspaper said it was the U.S. Embassy.

The operation had been planned for Wednesday, but it was discovered months earlier, according to the Interior Ministry announcement. It said that an official of Libyan intelligence promised an agent $500,000 to do the job.

Hundreds of policemen closed off several blocks around the American mission in the Garden City district, causing rush-hour traffic jams through the heart of Cairo. Witnesses and police on the scene said the security operation focused on the U.S. Embassy.

In Washington, White House spokesman Larry Speakes said Thursday that American officials were working closely with Egyptian authorities. “We have taken appropriate security measures,” he said.

Two police generals said the agent was “under control,” presumably meaning in custody.

The Interior Ministry statement said that the plan involved Libya, a Syria-based terrorist group and a third country in which the Libyan intelligence official was stationed. That country was not named.

It said that a green Czechoslovak-made Skoda pickup was to have been rigged as a truck bomb carrying 185 pounds of plastic explosives that would have been detonated outside the embassy at a time of heavy traffic.

Palestinian Faction

The newspaper Al Akbar said in today’s edition that it had learned the U.S. Embassy was the intended target. It did not give a source for its report.

Al Akbar identified the Syria-based organization as the Abu Nidal group, a radical Palestinian faction opposed to Yasser Arafat’s leadership of the Palestine Liberation Organization.

Egypt has accused the group in the past of being involved in attempted terrorist action against it.

Egyptian authorities learned of the planned operation last November, the Interior Ministry said, adding that a Libyan agent working for Libyan intelligence services arrived in Alexandria by ship on April 20 with a car carrying the bomb.

The statement said customs police defused the bomb without arresting the driver, whose movements were later monitored.

The suspect traveled to Damascus and returned to Cairo, where his telephone conversations with a Syrian-based “terrorist group” were taped, the ministry said.

Egypt has repeatedly blamed Libya for fomenting internal unrest. Last November, Egyptian security staged an intelligence coup when it announced it had thwarted an attempt to assassinate a former Libyan prime minister in Cairo.

Security agents at the time captured what Egypt said was a Libyan-paid hit squad and later duped Libya into announcing the former prime minister’s death before producing him alive in front of television cameras.

Egypt and Libya have been feuding since 1972, when the late President Anwar Sadat rejected a demand by Libyan leader Moammar Kadafi for an immediate merger of the neighboring countries.

They fought a six-day border war in July, 1977, and the antagonism between them was aggravated by Sadat’s 1979 peace treaty with Israel, which Kadafi considered treason to the Arab cause.