2 Hostages Smuggled to Iran in Coffins, Shia Source Claims : But Carlucci Sees Reason to Question Report of Transfer

Iranian Revolutionary Guards smuggled two American hostages from Lebanon to Iran in coffins that traveled part of the way in an Iranian Embassy car, a Shia Muslim source said today.

The source, who has been reliable in the past, told the Associated Press that the two American captives were “probably Terry Anderson and Thomas Sutherland.” He said the two were taken to Iran in May.

The source, who demanded anonymity, said the hostages were transported by way of Syria and Turkey. The transfer led an angry Syria to restrict travel by Revolutionary Guards across the Lebanese-Syrian border, he said.

In Washington, National Security Adviser Frank C. Carlucci told reporters: “I think there is some reason to question” the reports that Anderson and Sutherland have been transported to Iran.

“I really don’t want to comment on the movement of hostages; that’s a very sensitive issue,” Carlucci told a televised news conference. “I’ve seen these reports, and I think there is some reason to question them.”

Iran Denies It

Iranian Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Velayati, asked at a news conference in Vienna about the reported hostage transfers, said: “We categorically deny them.”

Anderson, 39, the AP’s chief Middle East correspondent, was kidnaped in West Beirut on March 16, 1985. He is the longest-held U.S. hostage. Sutherland, 55, of Fort Collins, Colo., a dean at American University of Beirut, was kidnaped June 9, 1985, in West Beirut.

Islamic Jihad, a Shia group loyal to Iran’s Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, claimed that it kidnaped both men.

The reported transfer took place late last month, the Shia source said. The two were first taken from Lebanon to the Iranian Embassy in Damascus, the Syrian capital, “in coffins as Revolutionary Guards martyrs killed in action against Israel.”

The coffins were driven from eastern Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley to Damascus in a Revolutionary Guards jeep through a military road that crosses the Lebanese-Syrian border, the source said.

From Damascus Via Turkey

“An Iranian Embassy car which has a diplomatic license plate transported them from Damascus to Iran via Turkey,” he added.

The Syrians, angered by the transfer of the hostages, have forbidden the estimated 3,000 Iranian Revolutionary Guards in the Bekaa to use military roads and have also imposed “restrictions on the trans-border movements of Iranian diplomats in Lebanon and Syria,” the source said.

The weekly magazine Al Shiraa reported June 13 that “some” of the eight Americans kidnaped in Lebanon had been transferred to Iran, where a five-man panel named by Khomeini was working to trade them for U.S. weapons and Iranian funds frozen in U.S. banks.

In November, the magazine broke the story of secret U.S. arms sales to Iran.