Athens Police Interrogate Local Arabs on TWA Blast

Greek police investigating Wednesday’s mid-air explosion on a Trans World Airlines jetliner, in which four people died, interrogated several Arabs living in Athens but made no arrests, police sources said Saturday.

The interrogations followed a statement the previous day by Foreign Minister Karolos Papoulias that Greek authorities would take the lead in investigating the blast in the starboard cabin wall of the TWA Boeing 727. Four American citizens, including a baby girl, were sucked out of the rapidly depressurized plane and fell to their deaths from 15,000 feet.

A senior Greek security officer, Nikos Kokkinakis, said a Lebanese woman named May Elias Mansour is the “prime suspect” in the bombing. In Tripoli, Lebanon, a woman who identified herself as the suspect acknowledged to reporters that she was aboard the targeted 727 on an earlier leg of the ill-fated flight from Cairo to Athens but repeated her denial of involvement in the bombing.

FBI Officials Present

An Athens coroner Saturday performed autopsies on the bodies of the four passengers, found near the Greek city of Argos. FBI officials were present at the autopsy, a police source said.

Greek police said they believe that the bomb, planted under a window seat, was made of plastic explosives and was the size of a cigarette pack.

The bombing occurred on the Rome-to-Athens leg of a flight that shuttles between those two cities and Cairo.

A Beirut caller claiming to represent an obscure group called the Arab Revolutionary Cells claimed responsibility for the bombing, saying it was retaliation for U.S. attacks on Libyan targets.

Police sources said Saturday that they continued to work on the assumption that Mansour may have been involved in the bombing, despite her denials.

“I have nothing to do with the incident and no knowledge of it,” the 31-year-old Mansour told a news conference Saturday at offices of Lebanon’s Syrian National Social Party in Tripoli.

“I support attacks against American targets, but not the way this attack was carried out,” she said. “But the United States as an army, a country and a policy--I’m against it.”

Acknowledging that she was aboard Flight 840, she denied a role in the bombing and said she was not in Seat 10F, the window seat where the bomb was believed to have been planted under the cushion.

The leftist Syrian National Social Party, which advocates the merger of much of the Arab world into a single nation, has claimed responsibility for suicide bombings against Israeli soldiers in southern Lebanon.

Mansour said she and her late husband, Atef Danaf, another party member, carried out attacks on Israelis during Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982.

Of the TWA attack she said: “There is no doubt (it) was a cruel one. Innocent people and children were killed. I send my good wishes to the wounded ones for a speedy recovery.”

If her party ordered her to attack U.S. targets, “I would for sure carry out their orders against America,” she said, “but I do not support operations that kill innocents.”

She said she owns a boutique and lives with her parents and 8-year-old daughter, Nisrine, and she added that she belongs to the Greek Orthodox Church. She said a stroke suffered after her husband’s death left her partially paralyzed. She walked with a limp, and her speech was slurred during the interview.