Fire Guts Capital Offices of Arab Group

The Washington offices of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee were gutted Friday evening by a fire that District of Columbia officials said appeared to be of suspicious origin.

The blaze, which began at about 8 p.m., started on the second floor of a four-story town house in Washington’s Dupont Circle neighborhood and quickly spread to the upper floors, destroying the committee’s records and equipment. No injuries were reported.

Barbara Shahin, deputy executive director of the group, was on the top floor of the building at the time of the fire. Shahin said she heard a “loud noise,” but did not realize that the building was afire until alarms went off, and she left her office about five minutes later.

Fire officials said that a witness across the street reported seeing the second story windows of the building blow out, apparently from an explosion, but the officials said that they could not immediately determine whether a bomb was responsible.

James G. Abourezk, national chairman of the committee, said that Shahin had received a threatening phone call before the fire.

The blaze appears to be one in a series of attacks against American-Arab Committee offices around the country. The committee’s West Coast regional director, Alex Odeh, was killed in a bomb blast at his Santa Ana office last month. In August, a bomb exploded in front of the committee’s Boston office, seriously injuring a policeman.

The FBI has linked the Orange County bombing to the militant Jewish Defense League. Irv Rubin, head of the JDL, has denied the accusation.