Set Off Car Bomb, 2 Terrorist Groups Say

West Germany’s outlawed Red Army Faction and a French terrorist group claimed joint responsibility Friday for a car bomb attack that killed two Americans and injured 20 other people Thursday at the U.S. Rhein-Main Air Base near Frankfurt.

The claim by the Red Army and the lesser-known French group Direct Action was made in a letter to West German newspapers and a news agency.

The guerrillas said they hit the base, which serves as the main air transport entry point for U.S. forces in Germany, because it is “a center for war against the Third World.” The base, the Marxist-oriented militants said, is “used to transport American troops and military equipment for acts of intervention in the Middle East and Africa.”

Further, said the letter, the base “is a nest of spies. It will be used as the entry gate to Europe in a war against the socialist states in the East.”

West German police officials said Friday that they consider the three-page typewritten letter, written in German and postmarked Thursday in West Germany, to be authentic, although they indicated that the Red Army Faction may have included the French group only as an act of solidarity.

The letter to the media carried a five-pointed star crossed with a machine gun, the symbol of the Red Army.

Later, West German police linked the air base attack to previous explosions in the country. Police said the guerrillas apparently packed explosives in gas cylinders similar to those used in a blast at a West German military school in Bad Ems, in October, 1983, and on the military section of the French Embassy in Bonn in December, 1984.

Police said they learned that the car used in the air base blast, a second-hand Volkswagen Passat-model, was purchased by a woman in a Frankfurt suburb on July 28. The vehicle bore one set of license plates when it was purchased, but these were replaced by special U. S. plates, entitling the car to enter the base.

Police said a witness on the base reported that the car drove into the parking lot outside the headquarters of the 435th Tactical Airlift Wing just before 7 a.m. It was left there by two men, and exploded about 20 minutes later.

The explosion killed Airman 1st Class Frank H. Scarton, 19, of Woodhaven, Mich., and Becky Jo Bristol, 22, the wife of another serviceman from San Antonio, Tex.

The Red Army faction is what remains of the notorious Baader-Meinhof gang that attempted to subvert institutions and terrorize prominent West Germans in the 1970s.

Earlier this year, Interior Minister Friedrich Zimmerman indicated that the Red Army Faction had a couple of dozen members prepared to die in terrorist actions--with another 150 or so supporters.

The letter from the Red Army said the perpetrators were from the “George Jackson Commando” unit, named after the black American militant who wrote the book “Soledad Brother” while at Soledad Prison. He was killed by a prison guard in an abortive 1971 escape from San Quentin penitentiary.

On Friday, the West German federal prosecutor’s office offered a reward of up to 50,000 marks, or about $17,700, for information leading to the arrest of 12 members of the faction whom it suspects of being involved in the bombing.

In a telegram to President Reagan, West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl promised to hunt down the terrorists. Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher also told Secretary of State George P. Shultz in a cable that “such a crime binds Germans and Americans more firmly to each other.”

The attack was the seventh this year against U.S. and North Atlantic Treaty Organization installations in West Germany but the first to cause fatalities.

Meanwhile, in what authorities said was an unrelated incident, a U.S. soldier was shot and killed after he and a German girl left a bar in Wiesbaden, about 25 miles from Frankfurt.

The 20-year old soldier, who was not named pending notification of next of kin, was last seen just before midnight. Police found his body in a nearby forest area. A U.S. military spokesman indicated that it was probably a criminal act on the part of a jealous boyfriend.