Indian Activist Means Under Fire From Sandinistas

American Indian activist Russell Means, inside Nicaragua on a clandestine visit to Miskito Indian rebels, has come under attack from Sandinista government troops, Miskito spokesmen said Wednesday.

There were contradictory reports about whether he was slightly wounded by shrapnel.

In a radio message from the eastern Nicaraguan jungle, Means charged that the Sandinistas are bombing Miskito villages, and he appealed for an end to the attacks.

Reportedly Grazed

Armstrong Wiggins, a Miskito spokesman in Washington, quoted Means as reporting that he was grazed on the leg by shrapnel from a bombing raid last week near the remote Miskito village of Laya Siksa, about 12 miles southwest of Puerto Cabezas on Nicaragua’s Caribbean coast.

However, a spokesman for the rebel group Misurasata in San Jose, Costa Rica, contradicted that report.

“It is not true that the American Indian leaders were wounded in combat,” said spokesman Delano Martin, referring to Means and a small group that accompanied him.

The leftist Nicaraguan government denied bombing any villages and charged that Means entered the country illegally.

“If he’s in Nicaragua and he’s in a war zone, we will try our best to see that he gets out safely,” said Myriam Hooker, a spokesman for the Nicaraguan Embassy. “But we cannot be held responsible for anything that happens.”

Dramatizing Struggle

Means, who led the Indian seizure of the town of Wounded Knee on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota in 1973, entered Nicaragua secretly Jan. 3 in an attempt to dramatize the struggle of the Miskitos, who have been fighting the Sandinistas since 1981 to win autonomy.

He was accompanied by Brooklyn Rivera, leader of Misurasata, as well as Hank Adams, director of the Survival of American Indians Assn. of Olympia, Wash.; Clem Chartier, president of the World Council of Indigenous Peoples of Ottawa, Ont., and Bob Martin, a free-lance journalist from Albuquerque, N.M.

Rivera’s Misurasata is one of three main factions among the Indians of the Caribbean coast, who speak their own languages and long have lived in isolation from Nicaragua’s main population centers on the Pacific coast.

Some Miskitos have joined the U.S.-funded rebels against the Sandinistas, but Rivera has refused and has waged his fight independently.

Repeated Raids Charged

Wiggins and Marcos Hopington, another Misurasata spokesman in Costa Rica, said the group entered Nicaragua solely on a fact-finding mission. But they said the group discovered last week that Sandinista troops were pursuing them and then saw repeated bombing raids against Laya Siksa and other villages.

Misurasata spokesman Martin said that Means, Adams and Chartier had to “disperse to avoid the enemy gunfire and are still separated from one another.”

“We lost contact with the group recently, but they already told us they were separating to avoid the planes and said they were not hurt,” he said.