Bonn Embassy Employee Shot Down in Paris

An employee at the West German Embassy was shot to death near the Eiffel Tower early today, and a leaflet found in the victim’s pocket claimed that a Kurdish nationalist group was responsible, officials said.

In a call to a Turkish news agency in London today, the same group claimed that it had placed a bomb aboard a West German jetliner that crashed near the Aegean coast Saturday and killed 16 people.

However, a statement issued later in the front’s name denied responsibility for either incident.

The shooting in Paris occurred about 3 a.m. on the Avenue de New York, on the right bank of the Seine across from the Eiffel Tower, said a police official, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Police said the attacker or attackers fled immediately after the assault not far from the West German Consulate on Avenue d’Iena.

In Paris Since 1986

The West German Foreign Ministry identified the dead man as Siegfried Wielspuetz, a consular employee who had been working in the French capital since 1986.

Initial police reports said Wielspuetz was a diplomat, but West German officials said he was an administrative employee and did not have diplomatic status.

An envelope found in a pocket of Wielspuetz’s jacket contained a tract by the Kurdish National Liberation Front, a militant Marxist group, police said. An official source, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the leaflet claimed responsibility for the death.

Fight for Autonomy

Police said the tract made no demands but recalled Kurdish complaints against the West Germans.

The Kurds live in the joint border areas of Turkey, Iran, Syria and Iraq. Nomadic Muslims, the Kurds have fought all four countries in their claim for an autonomous region.

The front has charged the West German government with discriminating against Kurdish refugees.

Turkey’s government-run Anatolian News Agency said an unidentified caller told its London bureau that “we killed the West German diplomat in Paris and we downed the plane that crashed in Izmir.”

Preparing to Land

The chartered Condor plane, a Boeing 737 en route from Stuttgart, West Germany, was preparing to land in the western city of Izmir, Turkey, when it crashed Saturday.

The Kurdish National Liberation Front, in a statement delivered late today to the Paris office of the French news agency Agence France-Presse, denied responsibility for the plane crash or the killing of the embassy worker.

The statement said there was a “conspiracy” to discredit the Kurdish movement.