U.S. Expects to Link USO, N.J. Bomb Suspects

Investigators expect to find links soon between the bombing of a USO club in Naples, Italy, apparently by Japanese terrorists, and Tuesday’s arrest in New Jersey of a Japanese man carrying three powerful explosive devices, sources familiar with the cases said Saturday.

While stressing that they still lack proof, the sources said that both incidents appear to be the work of the left-wing Japanese Red Army, which was tied to terror bombings in 1986 and 1987 after almost a decade of apparent inactivity.

The officials said both incidents may have been timed to coincide with the anniversary of the Reagan Administration’s April, 1986, air attack on Libyan military targets, and added that they fit a Red Army pattern of staging several terrorist acts simultaneously.

Blast Killed 5

American and Italian authorities say they have definitively tied a Japanese Red Army member, Junzo Okudaira, to the Thursday car bombing in Naples that killed five people, including a U.S. Navy enlisted woman, and injured 17 others.

Okudaira has not been captured, and FBI forensics experts and agents flew to Naples on Friday to aid the Italian investigation.

The man being held in New Jersey, Yu Kikumura, was carrying a stolen passport when a state trooper arrested him at a New Jersey Turnpike rest stop about 7 a.m. Tuesday. Police found three fire-extinguisher cylinders filled with metal pellets and black powder in the back of Kikumura’s 1980 Mazda.

Kikumura reportedly has refused to talk to authorities since his arrest, and U.S. sources said they still have no “hard link” between him and Okudaira. But, “We suspect that if this guy hadn’t acted suspiciously and an alert New Jersey trooper hadn’t nabbed him, we’d have had a bombing in the next day or two,” one knowledgeable U.S. official said.

On Saturday, an attorney who said that Kikumura has sought his help complained that U.S. authorities have refused to allow him to visit him in his jail cell.

‘Political Prisoner

Attorney Ronald Kuby, an associate of civil rights lawyer William Kunstler, charged that Kikumura “is being denied all attorney visits without explanation” and called him “a political prisoner.” Officials at Manhattan’s Metropolitan Correctional Center declined to comment.

The FBI, which is leading the U.S. investigation of both Kikumura and the Naples incidents, said through a spokesman Saturday that its investigation of the New Jersey case centers on two questions: where the bombs in Kikumura’s car were to be detonated, and whether he had an accomplice.

Kikumura had lived in a rented apartment in lower Manhattan for about six weeks before his arrest. Investigators were said to have ruled out as a suspect the man who shared his apartment during that period.

Possible Accomplice

However, authorities were said to believe that Kikumura had help within the United States, in part because a non-U.S. citizen would find it difficult if not impossible to legally acquire the 15 pounds of explosive black powder found in Kikumura’s car.

Court documents state that police found tools useful in making bombs among Kikumura’s possessions, as well as a receipt from an electronics store in a still-unnamed West Virginia town, indicating that he traveled widely during his few weeks in the United States.

“Did he have a confederate?” one U.S. official asked. “Probably, but we don’t know for certain yet.”

One U.S. official said it would probably take several days to establish beyond doubt any ties between Kikumura and the Red Army, and to check reports from Japan and elsewhere of Kikumura’s involvement in other bombing attempts.

Arrested in Amsterdam

News reports state that Kikumura was arrested in Amsterdam in early 1986 while carrying a false passport, 2 pounds of TNT and six fuses but was released on a technicality. Japan’s Kyodo News Service reported that Kikumura established ties to the Red Army in 1974 while running a bookstore in Athens.

Officials were equally uncertain about the intended targets of the bombs found Tuesday. Experts said Kikumura could have been bound for Washington, where finance ministers of the seven major industrialized nations wound up an annual meeting the day after his arrest. Other speculation centered on the annual economic summit of the heads of state of that same “Group of Seven,” scheduled for May in Toronto.

One American expert said it is unlikely that the Toronto meeting was a target because the confiscated bombs were effectively ready to be exploded. The Japanese Red Army did stage several embassy bombings in Italy last spring when the last economic summit was held in Venice.

Simultaneous acts of terror in Washington and Italy would fit the Japanese Red Army’s pattern of behavior. In addition to bombings in Rome and Venice last year, the terrorist group staged dual hostage-taking incidents in Singapore and Kuwait in the spring of 1974, and two similar incidents that autumn in The Netherlands and Paris.

Kadafi Link

U.S. officials indicated Saturday that they believe Libyan leader Moammar Kadafi is linked with the Naples bombing and, probably, with the abortive New Jersey effort as well. They discounted efforts by the Brigades of the Holy War, a Middle East fundamentalist Muslim group, to claim responsibility for the Naples explosion.

The Japanese Red Army has allied itself with several terrorist groups since its founding in 1969, including the PLO and the West German Baader-Meinhof gang, but 1986 news accounts indicate it most recently has received backing from Libya.

The Naples bombing occurred on the second anniversary of the United States’ April 15, 1986, bombings of the Libyan cities of Tripoli and Benghazi. The air raids were undertaken to punish Libya for an earlier terrorist bombing of a West Berlin discotheque.