American University Professor Is Kidnaped in Beirut

An American professor at the American University of Beirut was kidnaped on the road to the capital’s international airport, police said today.

Police said they believe Thomas Sutherland of Colorado, dean of the university’s school of agriculture, was seized about 6:30 p.m. Sunday.

The abduction of Sutherland raised to seven the number of Americans now missing in Lebanon.

“Yes, the report is true, but we need more time before releasing further details,” university spokesman Radwan Mawlawi said when asked about Sutherland’s kidnaping.

Sutherland, in his early 50s, was the second university staff member to be kidnaped in two weeks. Police and school officials said they believe he was seized on the highway leading to Beirut International Airport.

University sources, who asked not to be identified, said Sutherland was in university President Calvin Plimpton’s limousine and may have been mistaken for the university chief.

David P. Jacobsen, 54, of Huntington Beach, director of American University Hospital, the city’s largest, was kidnaped on May 28 as he walked to work in the mainly Muslim area of West Beirut. The shadowy Islamic Jihad terrorist group, which released a Polaroid photo of him shortly afterward, was believed responsible.

The seven Americans are among 12 Westerners missing in Lebanon.

Sutherland arrived in Beirut in the summer of 1983 to head the Faculty of Agriculture and Food Sciences, having previously taught at Iowa State and Colorado State.

In an interview with Times correspondent William Tuohy published in March, 1984, Sutherland indicated he was determined to stay in Beirut even though two of his American colleagues, American University President Malcolm Kerr and Prof. Frank Regier, had that year been victims of violence in the city, which is torn by civil war. Kerr was assassinated Jan. 18, 1984, and Reiger was abducted the next month.

“When you’re teaching class, you can’t pay any attention to the firing, otherwise you lose the attention of the students and they get worried and want to leave,” he told Tuohy.

In other developments in the strife in Lebanon, fighting was spread over three fronts Sunday, from Tripoli in the north to Sidon in the south.

Palestinians in the mountains overlooking Beirut pounded Shia Muslim militiamen with artillery fire, warning they will use all means to end the three-week-old siege of their nearby refugee camps.

However, fighters of the Shia militia Amal continued to trade gunfire with Palestinian gunmen inside the besieged Borj el Brajne and Chatilla refugee camps on the southern fringes of West Beirut.

Military sources said the clashes were particularly fierce on the outskirts of Borj el Brajne, the largest and best-defended camp. At least 16 people were killed and 30 wounded there in a 24-hour period over the weekend.

The gunfire around the two refugee camps triggered the shelling of Shia positions by Palestinian gunners in the Shouf mountains overlooking Beirut.

A third camp, Sabra, has already been overrun by Amal gunmen.

The shelling coincided with a statement from the National Salvation Front, a coalition of Palestinian groups, vowing to “respond with all means to lift the siege on the shantytowns.”

Police sources said 534 people have been killed and 2,260 wounded since fighting for control of the camps broke out May 19. Palestinians said there are another 500 dead in the camps, but the report could not be confirmed.

In Tripoli, rival Muslim groups battled in what appeared to be an offshoot of the factional violence spawned in Beirut’s “war of the camps.”

Police said sniper fire killed one person in Tripoli and six were wounded in clashes between Muslim factions, raising the official toll in the northern port city to 18 killed and 30 wounded in three days of fighting.

In the southern port of Sidon, security officials said unidentified gunmen opened fire on an Amal militiaman in the Martyr’s Cemetery, killing him and wounding two other people.