U.S. May Offer Reward in Salvador Cafe Deaths : Up to $100,000 Considered in Slaying of Four Marines; Figure Higher for Flight 847 Hijackers

The Reagan Administration may offer cash rewards for the capture of the killers of four U.S. Marines gunned down in El Salvador last month, along with a similar reward for the apprehension of the Beirut hijackers of TWA Flight 847, State Department officials say.

The rewards would be authorized under a law that enables the secretary of state to pay up to $500,000 each to individuals furnishing information leading to the arrest or conviction of terrorists.

Officials said this week that the rewards in the Salvadoran case might be set at $50,000 to $100,000, lower than the maximum figures discussed for the Beirut hijacking. “Fifty thousand dollars is a lot to a Salvadoran,” one official said.

Congress authorized a fund of $5 million for the reward program as part of an anti-terrorist law passed last year. The fund has not yet been used.

Gunned Down at Cafe

The four Marines were gunned down June 19 as they sat at a sidewalk cafe in San Salvador by a squad of six to 10 gunmen who arrived in a pickup truck. A leftist guerrilla group, the Central American Revolutionary Workers’ Party, claimed responsibility for the attack.

U.S. officials said that El Salvador’s national police have identified the leader of the hit squad but refused to divulge his name. The police apparently have not yet identified the other members of the squad, they said.

The Salvadorans have also recovered a truck that the killers are believed to have used and hope to find usable fingerprints on it, the officials said.

If the reward is approved, one official said, “we’d like to put wanted posters up all across El Salvador.” He said that the Salvadoran government would probably issue an arrest warrant as well.

But he warned that the reward might not bring in the murderers, who are presumably among the guerrillas in El Salvador’s northern mountains.

“It’s not your typical investigation,” he said. “The guerrillas aren’t likely to respond to a subpoena. Even if we can identify all of them, it’s really a case of counterinsurgency (work).”

But the reward would have an additional benefit, he noted: “It could cause chaos, paranoia and distrust among the guerrillas.”

Some questions remain, he said. “Who would administer the reward? How would we determine whether a genuine arrest had been made? If these guys are killed in combat with the army, do we pay then?”

Consideration of the rewards in both Beirut and San Salvador reflect the Administration’s drive since the TWA hijacking and the Marines’ murder to respond to terrorism with criminal sanctions rather than massive retaliation.

“It’s an interesting way of going about the gathering of information,” Shultz told a news conference Wednesday. “That’s one possible way to seek a certain class of information.”

One official said the State Department considered offering a reward earlier this year to combat South American narcotics traffickers but decided that “the kind of money we were talking about didn’t mean anything to the drug kings.”

The State Department announced Tuesday that it will formally call on the government of Lebanon to extradite the Beirut hijackers under terms of an air piracy treaty that Lebanon has signed.

But if that fails, sources said, the Administration is laying the groundwork for possible efforts to kidnap the hijackers and bring them to justice outside Lebanon--with the help of the reward. The Beirut hijackers murdered a Navy diver, Robert Dean Stethem of Waldorf, Md.

The anti-terrorist laws authorize the secretary of state to protect the identities of individuals receiving rewards.