Two Kidnaped From Store in West Beirut

Gunmen kidnaped two men believed to be foreigners from a store in Muslim West Beirut on Monday, dragged them by their hair to a getaway car and sped off. A store employee said the victims spoke broken English and might be Poles.

Meanwhile, the Kuwaiti News Agency, in an unconfirmed story, reported that Church of England envoy Terry Waite, who has been negotiating with the captors of American hostages in Lebanon, has been placed under “house arrest” by Shia Muslim kidnapers. Waite was last seen in public on Jan. 20, although church officials in London have continued to insist that he was well and safe.

The latest victims in a two-week outbreak of hostage-taking in the Muslim sector of the Lebanese capital apparently knew they were being chased and were trying to hide, witnesses said.

There were no immediate claims of responsibility, and embassies checked the roll-call of the city’s jittery foreign community in an attempt to identify the latest kidnap victims.

“They are foreigners, but I do not know their nationality,” said a sales clerk in the An Najar photocopy shop who witnessed the abduction. “Whenever they used to come to the shop, they always spoke to me in English.”

She said the two men, in their 20s, behaved strangely when they entered the store, whispering as if they were afraid.

“They are familiar to me,” she said. “They used to pass by us to photocopy documents. They always spoke broken English.

“I knew them for a while as Poles. I cannot recall exactly why but I assume they were first introduced to me as Poles,” the woman said.

“Fifteen minutes later, six gunmen in civilian clothes and carrying pistols came outside,” she said. “Two of the gunmen, who were bearded, came inside, and each grabbed a man by their hair, stuck pistols in their stomachs and dragged them outside.

A Warning Look

“One of the men is blond, tall and has blue eyes, I would say he is 23 years old. The other is shorter, has black hair, he must be 20 years old,” she said. “The gunmen looked at me as if warning me not to say a word.

“I was really scared,” said the woman, who identified herself only as Ahlam.

The victims were bundled into a white Mercedes-Benz sedan and driven away.

There was growing concern for Anglican envoy Waite, who has had success over the months in winning the freedom of Western hostages. He slipped from sight a week ago to meet members of the Islamic Jihad (Islamic Holy War) organization to bargain for the release of two Americans, Terry A. Anderson and Thomas Sutherland.

But a church spokeswoman in London said: “People in a position to know have assured us . . . of his safety and well-being. We have continued assurances today (Monday) that Mr. Waite is still in good hands and that he is continuing his work out of the public eye.”

Monday’s abductions came several hours after a deadline set by a terrorist group to kill one of its four Western hostages passed with no word on their fate. The group, called the Organization of the Oppressed on Earth, kidnaped the four Saturday.

A caller claiming to speak for the Muslim fundamentalist group threatened to kill one of the four--three Americans and an Indian-born U.S. resident alien--at midnight Sunday unless West Germany freed an Arab wanted in the United States in the 1985 hijacking of a Trans World Airlines jet in the Middle East and the murder of an American passenger.

Students March in Protest

An estimated 1,000 students marched through West Beirut on Monday, protesting the abduction of the four men--Alann Steen, Jesse Turner, Robert Polhill and Mithileshwar Singh, all professors at Beirut University College.

In Bonn, a Foreign Ministry spokesman said that West Germany has temporarily closed its mission in West Beirut “for security reasons.” Witnesses said Druze militiamen and Lebanese police escorted an unspecified number of embassy personnel across the city’s dividing Green Line to East Beirut.

Bonn is considering a U.S. request for extradition of the suspected TWA hijacker, Mohammed Ali Hamadi. Since West German authorities arrested Hamadi, West Germans have become targets for kidnapers in Lebanon--apparently to keep Bonn from handing him over to the Americans.

Including the four professors, Monday’s kidnapings bring to at least eight the number of Westerners abducted in West Beirut since the U.S. call for Hamadi’s extradition. Two others, possibly West Germans, were believed to have been kidnaped on Friday.

Late Monday night, a Saudi national identified as Khaled Deeb was reported kidnaped by unidentified gunmen near the Borj el Brajne Palestinian refugee camp. No other details were immediately available.

In New York, an official of Beirut University College said it is important to keep U.S. professors in the war-torn city.

“The college is one of the best ambassadors of America,” said Robert Stoddard, the university’s director of development for North America. “It exemplifies the best America has to offer.”