Polish Wife Tells of Travel to Libya, Syria, Lebanon : El Al Bomb Suspect’s Mideast Visits Reported

The Polish wife of a Palestinian being held by British police in connection with the attempted bombing of an airliner last month has told friends that he made frequent visits to Lebanon, Libya and Syria, ostensibly as a journalist.

Postcards that Nezar Hindawi sent his wife, Barbara Litwiniec, since she returned to Poland in 1984 establish that he traveled regularly to those three Arab countries and that he was in Syria as recently as late February, according to the woman’s friends, who asked to remain anonymous.

Litwiniec, 30, married Hindawi in December, 1980, in London, where her family sent her to visit an uncle and improve her English. They have a 4-year-old daughter who is with Litwiniec in Poland.

Syrian Help Reported

West Berlin police disclosed on May 6 that Hindawi’s brother, Ahmed Nawaf Mansour Hasi, had confessed to taking part in a bombing in West Berlin late in March that injured seven people and depicted Hindawi as the mastermind of the attack. Hasi reportedly told police that the Syrian Embassy in East Berlin supplied the explosives.

British authorities, acting partly on the basis of information supplied by Israel, have said they suspect both Libyan and Syrian involvement in the April 17 attempt to smuggle a bomb onto an El Al Israel Airlines jetliner at London’s Heathrow Airport. But the British have refused to elaborate on the evidence, which is said to link Hindawi to the two radical Arab states.

Britain expelled three Syrian diplomats Saturday after Syria refused to waive their diplomatic immunity and allow British investigators to question them about allegations of terrorist activity. However, the British government, in public statements, has made no connection between the expulsions and Hindawi’s arrest.

On Monday, a Foreign Office official, Tim Renton, said to the House of Commons that, despite the action against Syrian diplomats, “we have no reason whatever to doubt our earlier conclusions about Libyan involvement” in the attempted bombing of the Israeli airliner.

Girlfriend Seized

Hindawi, 31, a Jordanian-born Palestinian, was arrested in a London hotel on April 18, the day after security officers at Heathrow seized Hindawi’s pregnant Irish girlfriend, Anne-Marie Murphy, as she attempted to board El Al’s Flight 16 to Israel.

Her hand luggage was found to contain a bomb made of thinly rolled plastic explosives and a microchip timer that authorities said was sufficient to destroy the Boeing 747 and its 340 passengers. Police said she appeared to have been an innocent victim in the plot and to have believed Hindawi’s promise to marry her in Israel.

The same day that Scotland Yard seized Hindawi in London, police in West Berlin arrested Hasi, his 35-year-old brother, on suspicion of involvement in the April 5 bombing of La Belle discotheque, in which a U.S. Army sergeant and a Turkish woman were killed and more than 200 people injured, 63 of them Americans.

Berlin police have since said that there is little evidence linking Hasi to the discotheque bombing but that he admitted taking part in the March bombing against an Arab-German friendship society building in West Berlin.

Libya Visits

Besides reportedly identifying Syria as the source of explosives, Hasi reportedly has said that he made several visits to Libya, the last in 1985.

Independent American evidence of Libyan responsibility for the discotheque bombing, mainly in the form of intercepted messages to Libya’s embassy in East Berlin, led to the U.S. bombing of Libya on April 15.

Litwiniec, Hindawi’s Polish wife, has told friends that during their five years together in London, before she returned to Poland in 1984 with their daughter, she had no suspicion that her husband might be involved in terrorist activities.

Litwiniec is reported to have said that her husband’s brother Hasi was a frequent visitor to their London apartment, along with a number of Arab friends. She says she knew nothing of their business because they spoke almost entirely in Arabic, which she does not understand.

According to West Berlin officials, Hindawi’s last known meeting with his brother was in January or February. The bombing of the Arab-German friendship society in Berlin occurred a little more than a month later.

Newspaper ‘Messenger’

Polish sources said Hindawi told his wife that he had a university degree in journalism and explained his frequent travels by telling her that he was working as a “messenger” for an Arab-language newspaper in London. Since his arrest, the acquaintances said, she has learned that he worked for the newspaper only a few weeks in 1984 before being fired.

She was also unaware of her husband’s Palestinian nationality, they said. Having visited Hindawi’s father and two sisters in Amman, Jordan, several years ago, she assumed he was Jordanian.

The friends said Litwiniec also knew nothing about his Irish girlfriend who, in turn, appears to have known nothing of Hindawi’s Polish wife and child.

They said her devoutly Roman Catholic family was scandalized by her marriage to an Arab, but was nevertheless hospitable to him. Litwiniec’s mother, however, remained skeptical of her Muslim son-in-law because of his insatiable appetite for ham, bacon and other pork products in violation of Muslim dietary laws. She called him a “pork vacuum cleaner.”

Litwiniec’s father, encountered in his apple orchard in Radzyn Podlaski, a small town 75 miles southeast of Warsaw, declined to talk with a Times reporter except to say that his daughter was in seclusion with relatives. Of Hindawi, he said “he was a good boy,” a journalist, who had helped with the apple harvest when he last came to Poland to see his wife and daughter.