U.S. Still Lacks Hard Evidence Linking Syria to Airport Attack

The Reagan Administration still has no conclusive evidence that Syria played a direct role in the Rome airport massacre last December, although at least one of the terrorists involved was trained in a Syrian-controlled area of Lebanon, officials said Wednesday.

Secretary of State George P. Shultz told a meeting of Massachusetts businessmen that if Syria is directly implicated in the attack, it will not be exempt from retaliation by the United States. “We have the same attitude toward terrorism from whatever source it comes,” he said.

But Shultz added that the Dec. 27 attacks on travelers at Rome and Vienna airports, in which five Americans and 15 others were killed, are still being investigated. “We don’t want to prejudge the results,” he said.

The sole terrorist who survived the Rome attack has told his Italian captors that he was trained in Lebanon’s Syrian-controlled Bekaa Valley, then flew to Europe from the Syrian capital of Damascus last December, State Department officials said.

They said the account of the confessed terrorist, Mohammed Sarham, has been corroborated by other evidence that they refused to describe.

However, they said, it is not clear whether the Syrian government was aware of Sarham’s training, his movements or his mission.

Sarham is a follower of Palestinian terrorist leader Abu Nidal, whose organization has offices in Syria and Libya but is apparently not completely controlled by either regime, the officials said.

The New York Times reported Wednesday that Italian authorities have told the CIA that Sarham directly implicated Syria, but a State Department official disputed that account. “Nobody in the intelligence community has seen anything like that,” he said.

Until recently, the Administration placed almost all blame for the airport attacks on Libya’s Col. Moammar Kadafi. The United States bombed the Libyan capital of Tripoli last month in retaliation for a bombing attack on a nightclub in West Berlin.