Tripoli Returning to Normal: Shops Open, Commercial Flights Resume

Most commercial flights out of the Libyan capital resumed Saturday, and many Libyans returned to work for the first time since U.S. warplanes attacked the North African country last Tuesday.

Most shops were open, and streets were busier than at any time since the U.S. attack, which Libya said killed 37 people and wounded 93. Other sources say the toll was much higher.

Residents were seen scraping car headlights free of paint, which had been applied to dim the lights as a precaution against further raids. Many people who left after the raid have returned to resume work, some residents said.

Most scheduled commercial flights were operating for the first time since the raid shut Tripoli airport.

Foreigners Departing

Several hundred foreigners left on commercial airliners Saturday, and at least one airline, West Germany’s Lufthansa, added a special flight, but diplomats said no extraordinary measures had been taken to evacuate foreign residents.

Airline sources said most of the foreigners who flew out Saturday were wives and children of expatriate workers.

A Tripoli radio commentary dismissed foreign news reports of unrest and said foreign nationals in Libya were in no danger.

“Affairs . . . are completely normal,” the broadcast said. “The U.S.-British aggression has only led to more commitment and cohesion within the Jamahiriya (Libya) and more rallying of the masses around its historic leadership.”

Fear of Reprisals

Some British residents had feared reprisals because Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher allowed the United States, in mounting the raid, to use its F-111 bombers based in Britain.

Announcing the attack last week, President Reagan said the United States was retaliating for the April 5 terrorist bombing of a West Berlin nightclub, in which an American soldier was killed, after learning that Kadafi’s regime was responsible.

Friday night was the first since the raid without blackouts, firing and demonstrations in support of Libya’s leader, Col. Moammar Kadafi.

Reports reaching Tripoli from Benghazi, which was also hit in the Tuesday air raid, said the eastern city was quiet. Benghazi airport--which Tripoli radio said had been hit, with damage to several civilian airliners--has reopened, the reports said.

Libyan officials said a bomb that did not explode when dropped during the air strike on Tripoli blew up Saturday night in a residential district, injuring a man and two boys.

The type of bomb was not immediately determined, nor was there independent confirmation that the bomb was dropped during the American air attack. Libyan officials were restricting foreign reporters to their hotels except for escorted trips.

Umaru Mahur, 13, and Adeli Gadathi, 11, were playing soccer when they found the bomb in a mound of rubble in the Ben Ashur district, the officials said. It blew up when Khaled Zhaker, 23, tried to remove it, they said.

In the explosion, Zhaker lost his left hand and most of his right hand and suffered shrapnel wounds in his chest and leg. Doctors said they did not know if he would live.

“It had a red point on the end of it,” Gadathi said as he lay in his bed at the Old Central Hospital with his neck bandaged from shrapnel wounds. “I brought it over to my friend, then it went off in his hands.”

Libyan officials have distributed posters telling residents not to pick up strange objects.

The street where the explosion occurred is about 450 yards from a neighborhood hit by the Air Force F-111s. At least 17 residents of the area were reported killed in the bombing.

Earlier, the government said Libyan explosives experts were searching for scores of unexploded bombs dropped during the air raid.

Libyan military officials said Saturday that they found 17 unexploded fragmentation bombs near Tripoli’s international airport. The airport’s military sector was one of five U.S. targets in the raid.

State-run television Saturday showed Libyan leader Moammar Kadafi visiting the graves of air raid victims. Kadafi, who often is seen in a military uniform, wore a suit in the Saturday broadcast and was accompanied by a few aides and an official photographer. No members of the public were visible.

Kadafi has not met with foreign reporters since the air raid, and there were reports soon after the attack--mostly out of Washington--that he was injured or facing a rebellion within his military.

Viewing bomb damage, reporters were bused Saturday to two small farms near the Tripoli airport, where one farmer told them that the U.S. attack cost him at least 300 of his best chickens.

“Tell Reagan, ‘Thank you very much!’ ” Miloud Hassan shouted to the journalists. “He killed my chickens! . . . Reagan is a chicken killer!” The 61-year-old farmer’s complaints were translated from the Arabic by a government interpreter.

“My chickens were asleep; now they are buried,” he said, standing near a devastated hen house, its tin roof blown to pieces by a powerful blast that gouged a crater in the orange grove nearby. Most of his 6,000 chickens survived the bombing, however, Hassan said.

Amid a swarm of television cameras, photographers and clucking poultry, Hassan then grabbed two white hens by the neck and began chanting: “Down with the U.S.A.! Down with the U.S.A.!”

On another farm, reporters saw an unexploded 481-pound bomb lying in a fig orchard, marked with the English words “Explosive Tritonal. Explosive Bomb.”

Reporters were also allowed inside the bombed out Aziziya Barracks that served as Kadafi’s headquarters and residence in Tripoli.

The farmer, who said his name was Shtou, said bombs blew off the doors of all six rooms in his house and injured three of his sheep.

“But my rabbits are all fine,” he said. “They have their own air raid shelters--they went underground.”

In another development, the Sunday edition of the West German newspaper Bild reported in its Sunday editions that Kadafi is paying Abu Nidal, leader of a violent Palestinian group, $12 million yearly to stage terrorist attacks.

Bild, known for its excellent intelligence sources, said Kadafi and Abu Nidal, at a secret meeting in Tripoli last September, agreed that American, British, Israeli, and Egyptian installations and citizens should be attacked.

The newspaper said Kadafi had worked out a “price list” for terrorist acts and pays $1,770 for planting a bomb, $3,550 for a grenade attack, $5,330 for an attack with a submachine gun and $53,330 in advance for those who plan and carry out suicide attacks. Bild attributed its dispatch to Israeli and Lebanese intelligence reports.

Abu Nidal’s Libyan-backed group is believed to have carried out a string of terrorist attacks, including assassinations and bombings, since the early 1970s. Abu Nidal broke from Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization in 1974.