Egypt Accuses Libya but Seems to Rule Out War

Egypt directly accused Libya on Tuesday of instigating the hijacking of an EgyptAir jetliner, but President Hosni Mubarak suggested that he will not retaliate militarily at this time despite the fact that Egyptian troops have been mobilized near the Libyan border.

“We do not call for war. We call for peace,” Mubarak told reporters when asked if Egypt plans to mount a military strike against Libya. “War is not a simple thing,” he said. “We cannot take that decision simply.”

There were these other developments related to the weekend hijacking:

--The government of Malta said that the only terrorist to survive the storming of the airliner by Egyptian troops at Valletta airport, a 20-year-old Tunisian, has been identified by some of the passengers as the leader of the hijackers.

--In Beirut, a renegade Palestinian guerrilla group led by the terrorist Abu Nidal claimed responsibility for the seizing of the plane.

--Libya denounced the assault by Egyptian commandos as a “reckless action” and accused Egypt of trying to cover up the facts surrounding the incident.

Meets With Soviet Envoy

Mubarak talked briefly with reporters after meeting separately with his defense minister and with the Soviet ambassador to Egypt, Alexander Belongov. The envoy said he briefed Mubarak on the results of last week’s Geneva summit meeting, but the two men were also believed to have discussed Egypt’s deepening crisis with Libya, which receives aid from Moscow.

A two-day-old military alert along the 800-mile Libyan frontier remained in effect. Asked repeatedly if an attack against Libya is likely, Mubarak refused to rule it out, saying, “This is not the place to tell you what is going to happen.”

However, he appeared to play down the prospects of an armed confrontation. In an apparent allusion to Libyan leader Moammar Kadafi, Mubarak said, “One does not punish one person by punishing a whole people.”

Egyptian officials have said the reason behind the military mobilization was Egypt’s belief that Libya was involved in the weekend hijacking of the EgyptAir Boeing 737 to Malta.

The hijacking ended Sunday when Egyptian commandos stormed the plane, resulting in a bloodbath that took 58 lives. One hostage passenger, Scarlett M. Rogenkamp, 38, of Oceanside, Calif., and an Egyptian security guard were killed earlier by the hijackers.

Cairo radio, in an official commentary, said the hijackers were members of an extremist Palestinian group “funded and instigated by Kadafi’s Libya, which is a well-known supporter and haven for terrorists.”

No Proof Yet Offered

However, Egypt has so far offered no proof of Kadafi’s involvement, which Libya has denied. Declaring that “the connection is clear,” Mubarak told reporters that one of the terrorist group’s leaders “is in Libya at the moment, staying in Room 401 of the Grand Hotel” in Tripoli.

Journalists who called the hotel from Rome were told that the occupant of Room 401 was “out for the evening.”

Observers said Mubarak appeared to be referring to Abu Nidal, a longtime practitioner of terrorism against Israel and against Palestinian factions that he considered too moderate in their politics. His real name is Sabri Banna, but he is better known by his guerrilla pseudonym .

Beirut newspapers Tuesday published a claim by a group loyal to Abu Nidal that it was responsible for the hijacking.

The statement was signed by the Arab Revolutionary Brigades, which named him as its leader, and by another group called the Organization of Egyptian Revolutionaries.

Earlier, a group calling itself Egypt Revolution said it hijacked the plane, adding that it would act again unless Egypt voids the “treasonous” 1979 peace treaty signed with Israel.

Broke With Arafat

Abu Nidal’s terrorist followers have operated outside the Palestine Liberation Organization since he broke with PLO leader Yasser Arafat in the 1970s. His group, also known in the past as Black June and the Revolutionary Council of Fatah, has been blamed for the assassination of both Israelis and mainstream PLO figures.

The relationship between Abu Nidal and the Egyptian revolutionary groups is not known.

The Beirut statement said the hijacking was carried out by three Palestinians, two Egyptians and “an international struggler.”

Meanwhile, Maltese authorities said that the sole terrorist to survive the attack on the plane is a 20-year-old Tunisian and that some of the passengers have identified him as the leader of the band that hijacked the EgyptAir jet.

Government spokesman Paul Mifsud identified the man as Omar Marzouki, according to news service accounts. Mifsud said a magistrate has begun questioning Marzouki about the hijacking and that if there is sufficient evidence against him, he will be charged. Maltese authorities said earlier that Marzouki, one of five Arab terrorists who seized the plane, was out of danger after surgery and under heavy police guard in a Valletta hospital.

Western diplomats in Cairo, trying to assess the seriousness of the Egyptian-Libyan border alert, noted that Mubarak is not adventuresome by nature and not likely to act rashly. An Egyptian newspaper editor added that, while Mubarak is “very angry at Kadafi, he has to be careful. Libyan missiles can hit Alexandria,” Egypt’s second-largest city.

1977 Border Clashes

Egypt and Libya fought a brief border war in 1977, and there have been a number of military alerts along the frontier since then. Most were staged in response to what the Egyptians said were Libyan plans to carry out terrorist attacks or assassinations in Egypt.

The diplomats also noted that the crisis with Libya, real or not, is proving useful to Mubarak as a way of deflecting criticism of the bloody commando raid, the details of which have either been distorted or censored in both official Egyptian statements and in the government-guided press, which has still not reported the true casualty figures.

Privately, however, senior Egyptian officials and Western diplomats have called the raid a fiasco that is proving deeply embarrassing to the Mubarak government.

The president told reporters that the decision to storm the plane was made only after the pilot appealed to the Malta control tower to “do something because they are going to kill us all.” The hijackers had already shot five people execution-style, although four survived.

“If we had been any later, they would have killed a large number of people,” Mubarak said. He repeated Egyptian claims that the dozens of victims were killed by the hijackers’ hand grenades and not by the commando assault.

“Only seven bullets were fired by our forces,” he went on. “Three of them hit one hijacker, two hit another and two went astray.”

However, this was contradicted by the testimony of several survivors, who said that the commandos--unable to tell the hijackers from the passengers--fired indiscriminately at both.

Reports from Malta also quoted David Levy, charge d’affaires at the U.S. Embassy, as saying evidence indicated that the fire that swept through the cabin during the raid was not caused by the grenades detonated by the hijackers, as Egypt asserted. The implication seemed to be that the fire was started by the explosives that the commandos used to gain access to the plane.

“No matter how the Egyptians try to explain it, it is clear that this raid was a fiasco--a tragic failure,” a Western diplomat in Cairo said.

U.S. officials in Valletta would not comment on a report that an American military aircraft was circling overhead at the time of the commando attack.

Western diplomats in Cairo said several U.S. military officers in uniform were present at Malta’s airport when the raid took place.