Refugee Issue Suspected in W. German Blast, Shooting

A bomb exploded in the main offices of the state-owned Lufthansa airline Tuesday, and hours later a West Berlin immigration official was shot and wounded. A prosecutor’s spokesman said both attacks may be linked to the growing refugee problem.

A leftist urban guerrilla gang called Revolutionary Cells claimed it attacked the Lufthansa building in a protest of West German immigration policies.

Police said that a bomb placed on the north facade of the Lufthansa building broke windows, blew a hole in the outer wall to expose a telephone switchboard center and damaged a utility room housing batteries. The pre-dawn bombing caused about $47,000 damage, but no one was injured, Cologne police said.

Less than six hours later, Harald Hollenberg, 54, whose office handles registration of all foreigners who reside in West Berlin, was shot in both legs at close range by unidentified assailants as he left his house for work. He was not gravely wounded.

No Claim of Responsibility

A police spokesman said the shooting, which resembled “warning” attacks by Italy’s Red Brigades, was probably a terrorist act. Authorities believe two men and a woman were involved and said their escape car later was found abandoned and engulfed in flames. There was no claim of responsibility in the attack.

Authorities say that more than 75,000 refugees and asylum-seekers have poured into West Germany and West Berlin this year, resulting in increased federal efforts to stem the flow. Reports of resistance to refugees in West German towns and cities have become frequent in the nation’s news media.

“In the Lufthansa attack as well as in the attack on . . . Hollenberg, the asylum and foreigner question obviously plays a role,” said Alexander Prechtel, spokesman for the chief federal prosecutor, Kurt Rebmann.

Prechtel said in a telephone interview that terrorists could have coordinated the two attacks.

Prechtel recalled that on Aug. 31, terrorists bombed the foreigners’ department of the federal government’s administrative offices in Cologne and a Lueneburg court that rules on cases involving political asylum-seekers.

Offices handling foreigners’ registration were bombed on Sept. 25 in Hamm and Hagen, Prechtel said. No one was hurt in those attacks.

In letters received by a news agency and by an independent journalist, Revolutionary Cells said it attacked the Lufthansa building to protest West Germany’s expulsion of some Third World immigrants who asked to remain in the country. The group asserted that the airline is profiting from the expulsion of aliens.