Rome Terrorists Trained in Iran, Italian Official Says

A senior Italian intelligence official said Sunday that four terrorists who attacked Rome’s Leonardo da Vinci Airport last week had been trained in Iran and arrived in Italy after a stopover in Damascus, Syria.

Fulvio Martini, director of the Italian Secret Service, gave no other details in an interview with a Rome newspaper, but Western intelligence officials have long considered Muslim fundamentalist Iran to be a training ground for Middle East terrorists.

Martini also warned, without elaborating, that a new wave of assaults by Palestinian militants against Western European targets might be coming within days.

Almost simultaneous attacks Friday by four Arab terrorists at Leonardo da Vinci and three at Vienna’s international airport left 15 people dead--including five Americans--and 75 wounded here and three dead and more than 40 injured in Vienna. Among the dead were four of the terrorists.

The assaults were aimed at the check-in counters of El Al, the Israeli national airline.

Italian officials identified the attackers as members of a terrorist group headed by Abu Nidal, who led a radical faction out of Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization in the 1970s. They added that the sole survivor among the four Rome attackers said his group had planned more attacks on major airports in Europe.

The surviving guerrilla, Mohammed Sarham, 19, told investigating magistrate Domenico Sica that he and his three companions had received help from confederates inside Italy before the Friday assault, according to a published report here attributed to police sources.

These sources quoted Sarham, who is still in the hospital under guard, as telling investigators: “We had charge of realizing the mission in agreement with our companions sent to Vienna. We have sufficient help and determination to carry on our fight against imperialist and Zionist objectives.”

A police official told reporters, “From the one or two elements we have in hand, we hope to discover the support that the terrorists certainly had in Rome.” The official said it is “extremely probable” that accomplices supplied the terrorists with guns.

Sarham said he and his companions carried their weapons to the terminal in lightweight personal luggage, which, as is the custom at most European airports, was not searched at the entrance to the terminal building, the published report said.

Police said they found lightweight baggage at the airport containing five unexploded grenades wrapped in towels.

Another police official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said authorities believe that the terrorists’ local accomplices were the same ones who helped carry out two attacks in Rome last September.

On Sept. 25, a bomb explosion killed a woman employee and injured 13 people at the offices of British Airways. Nine days earlier, a hand grenade attack on a crowded cafe on the Via Veneto wounded 39 people. Police arrested and charged two Palestinians in those attacks.

Told of Formal Charges

ANSA, the Italian news agency, reported that Judge Sica told Sarham late Sunday that he was formally charged with participating in the airport massacre, with transporting illegal arms and with related offenses.

Officials in Vienna said Sunday they believe that the murderous attacks in the Austrian and Italian capitals are part of the same plot, masterminded by Abu Nidal.

Austrian Interior Minister Karl Blecha said he does not believe that the PLO was directly involved, even though one of the two terrorists captured after the Vienna assault is reported to have told a CBS television reporter that “I am Fatah.”

Fatah, headed personally by Arafat, is a mainstream faction of the PLO. But it also forms part of one of the names used by the Abu Nidal group--the Revolutionary Council of Fatah.