Terrorist Group Says It Caused Fatal Paris Blast

The French terrorist group Direct Action claimed responsibility Friday for a bombing at a Paris police annex that killed a police inspector, and authorities launched a nationwide hunt for a suspect described as “the most wanted man in France.”

The claim, linking Wednesday’s blast to the killing of an automobile painter shot by a policeman last Saturday in Paris, was made in a typewritten letter delivered to the Paris Le Monde newspaper. An anonymous telephone caller also read it twice to the newspaper.

Police laboratory tests found that the typewriter and the machine used to photocopy the statement were the same ones used to print Direct Action statements left at the sites of two bomb blasts in Paris last Saturday.

Those explosions, at the offices of two French companies with links to South Africa, caused no casualties.

Wednesday’s bomb at the police facility also wounded 22 people. Police said two of the wounded police officers are in deep comas.

‘We Have a Suspect’

“We believe it was Direct Action and (we) have a suspect,” said a police spokesman.

Police sources said the suspect was Max Frerot, the only known hard-liner in the anarchist group who is still at large. Frerot is a former army paratrooper and explosives expert.

“He is the most wanted man in France,” the spokesman said. He said a nationwide manhunt had been launched for Frerot.

The bombers Wednesday detonated about 20 pounds of explosives hidden in the Paris headquarters of a police division that deals with criminal cases, killing Divisional Inspector Marcel Basdevant.

“We take responsibility for the action against the prefecture of police,” said the Direct Action letter. It was signed by the “Commando Loic Lefevre”--named after a 27-year-old car painter who was shot to death Saturday by a policeman in Paris. Lefevre was chased by a vanload of police for driving dangerously.

Killed ‘for Looking Suspicious’

“In the country of the white man’s rights, one kills for the misdemeanor of looking suspicious,” it said. Officials maintain Lefevre was shot reaching for what police thought was a gun, but critics say he was killed in cold blood.

The officer concerned has been charged with manslaughter, but the case has resurrected a public debate on police powers as the National Assembly or Parliament debates legislation to increase them and crack down on terrorists.

Interior Minister Charles Pasqua said Wednesday that the bombing is “a terrorist challenge to the state itself.”

Authorities are investigating possible links between the Paris attack and the assassination in a bomb blast of a West German nuclear physicist and his driver outside Munich several hours earlier Wednesday.

The Munich killings were claimed by the West German terrorist group Red Army Faction. Direct Action, allied since January with the Red Army Faction, has carried out about 20 bombings and assassinations in France since January, 1985.