Blast Fatal to Peru Rebel in What Police Say May Have Been Attempt to Kill Garcia

A woman member of the Sendero Luminoso guerrilla band died here Friday when a homemade mortar exploded in what appeared to be a botched assassination attempt against Peruvian President Alan Garcia, police said.

The attempt apparently was the Maoist guerrilla group’s response to the bloody retaking of three prisons Wednesday and Thursday in which more than 260 guerrilla inmates died.

The mortar exploded in the late morning, on the roof of a six-story apartment house two blocks from the convention center where a stern-faced Garcia was shortly to open a congress of the Socialist International, according to police and local residents.

It killed a woman in her early 30s, scattering parts of her body into the street below. Authorities did not disclose her name.

Police said that the explosion occurred at about the time Garcia had been scheduled to open the Socialist conference. The conference began late, however, probably because leaders of Garcia’s party, the American Popular Revolutionary Alliance, were describing the prison revolt to a political committee of the conference and announcing that they had set up a commission of inquiry.

Handmade Weapons

Rudimentary, often handmade weapons are a trademark of Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path), whose uprising based in the Andean Mountains has claimed nearly 10,000 lives in Peru since 1980.

As Garcia was promising conference delegates that Peru’s democracy would not yield to terrorist blackmail, protests grew among Peruvian leftists against his government’s bloody recapture of three prisons that the Maoist guerrillas had seized Wednesday.

University students burned an air force truck and skirmished with police in Lima. In the adjoining Pacific port of Callao, site of one the recaptured prisons, police arrested 28 protesting relatives of prisoners killed in the military assaults.

Terrorists exploded bombs and set fires in three movie theaters near the Socialists’ convention site, but there were no injuries.

“Garcia has given carte blanche for the armed forces to kill,” charged Marta Huatay, member of a group of leftist lawyers who have represented Sendero Luminoso prisoners and their families.

No official casualty totals from the prison assaults were made public, but by Friday afternoon, government ministers discussing the affair used a figure of 266 dead inmates. The armed forces reported three officers killed and about two dozen officers and men wounded.

The government’s unreleased count listed 138 dead prisoners at the treeless prison island of El Fronton, where guerrillas barricaded inside a two-story concrete pavilion battled marines for almost a full day until navy demolition teams destroyed the building. The government said that 30 prisoners were recaptured at El Fronton.

At the giant Lurigancho prison in Lima, which was retaken in bitter fighting before dawn Thursday, 126 guerrillas died, according to the government’s unreleased count. Well-placed Peruvian sources said that no Sendero Luminoso guerrilla convicts survived at Lurigancho.

The U.S. Embassy here said that six American citizens are being held on narcotics charges among the 5,500 prisoners at Lurigancho but that they were not injured in the military assault.

Siege Atmosphere

The Maoists also seized the Santa Barbara womens’ prison in Callao in the three-facility revolt at dawn Wednesday. Two inmates died when that prison was retaken Wednesday night.

A siege atmosphere gripped this gray capital city Friday as delegates from 75 countries gathered for the first congress of the Socialist International, an organization of Socialist and Social Democratic political parties, to be held in Latin America. Police with automatic weapons stood every few yards along downtown streets, a helicopter prowled overhead, and armored personnel carriers dotted the slow-moving lanes of traffic.

As the conference opened, delegates learned that Italian Prime Minister Bettino Craxi, who was expected to attend the conference, had joined a lengthy list of prominent dropouts.

Garcia, 37, a self-described social democrat who took office last July at a time that he described to conference delegates as “the deepest crisis in Peruvian history,” vigorously defended his decision to put down the prison revolts by assault.

He portrayed the coordinated prison uprisings as a calculated attempt by the guerrillas to embarrass Peru while international attention is focused here. He noted, too, that “numerous citizens and members of the security forces were also assassinated in the past few days.

“All this was done to blackmail our democracy in front of the peoples of the world with criminal acts which thus show they share the same objectives as the economic power which subjugates the true destiny of the human race,” Garcia said.

Garcia, a fiery nationalist who has decreed that Peru will limit repayment of its $14-billion international debt to 10% of exports, often attacks the economic domination of major industrial countries.

He told the conference delegates that he had sent a peace commission to the prisons.

“Men of good faith went to the prisons to beg, to implore the prisoners to avoid bloodshed. This attempt failed and the state was forced to impose its authority,” he said.