2 Groups Claim They Staged Air Base Bombing

Two left-wing terrorist groups, one West German and the other French, claimed joint responsibility today for the car-bombing of a U.S. Air Force base that killed two Americans and injured more than 20 people.

Kurt Rebmann, West Germany’s chief federal prosecutor, had said Thursday that the Red Army Faction was suspected in the attack. Police identified 12 terrorists being sought in connection with the bombing.

This morning, the Associated Press received a letter signed by Direct Action, a French leftist extremist group, and the Red Army Faction, a West German organization, taking responsibility for Thursday’s bombing in the name of “Commando George Jackson.”

Jackson, who is dead, was a militant black activist in California in the early 1970s. He and two other prison inmates became known as the “Soledad brothers” and allegedly murdered a guard at California’s Soledad prison in 1970 in the aftermath of a prison race riot.

He gained a reputation as a spokesman for black militancy through the book “Soledad Brother, the Prison Letters of George Jackson.”

The three-page, typewritten letter, postmarked in West Germany, dated Thursday and written in German, said the U.S. Rhein-Main Air Base, “the biggest military freight base of the U.S. forces outside the U.S.A., is a turntable for war in the Third World directed from Western Europe.”

The letter continued: “The air base is a secret service nest. Here stand computers, airplanes, helicopters ready for missions by the Special Forces.

“We attacked the Rhein-Main Air Base today with the Commando George Jackson.”

The Red Army Faction is an anarchist group that has terrorized West Germany with bombings and assassinations for more than a decade. It frequently has directed attacks at U.S. facilities.

Two killed by bomb, Page 4.