Intelligence Office Bombed in W. Germany

A bomb heavily damaged the headquarters of West Germany’s counterespionage agency today, and officials said they suspected the Red Army Faction was responsible.

The bomb, placed in a car outside the Constitutional Protection Office, exploded at 3:45 a.m. with “incredible force,” said Alexander Prechtel of the federal prosecutor’s office in Karlsruhe.

The blast slightly injured a passer-by and caused several hundred thousand dollars in damage, Prechtel told the Associated Press.

“We suspect militant members of the Red Army Faction,” he said.

The bomb, hidden in a red Volkswagen Golf, was detonated by a 90-foot-long cable that stretched around the corner from the building in a residential area of Cologne.

“Whoever did it must have driven up, left the car, gone around the corner and detonated the bomb,” Prechtel said.

An anonymous caller telephoned a local newspaper this morning and claimed responsibility in the name of one of the Red Army Faction’s offshoots, the Revolutionary Cells.

But investigators doubted the call’s authenticity, Prechtel said.