Greeks Blame Arab Gang in Ship Attack

Greek police on Tuesday blamed hostage-seeking Arab terrorists who botched their mission for the indiscriminate attack on a shipload of foreign tourists.

The government reported nine dead and 23 others still hospitalized Tuesday night following the attack Monday as the small cruise ship City of Poros headed for port after a sunny day’s visit to Aegean islands.

However, on a day when information was sketchy and sometimes contradictory, coroner Manolis Nonas, at the port of Piraeus, said he had 10 bodies, while harbor authorities reported an 11th. A handful of Americans among the 400 mostly West European tourists all escaped injury, the U.S. embassy said.

No group has yet claimed responsibility for the attack, and well-placed Greek sources hypothesized Tuesday night that it was aimed at taking hostages to barter for the release of an alleged Palestinian skyjacker jailed here, who faces extradition to the United States.

Pivotal to a national dragnet for the terrorists, who vanished without a trace, are photographs released Tuesday of three Arab men. Two of them were said to have entered Greece in May on Lebanese passports. Greek sources said police also were seeking at least one woman traveling on a Moroccan passport.

Photos Being Circulated

“These people were involved in yesterday’s attack,” said Police Minister Anastasios Sehiotis as he distributed the pictures of the three men. “The pictures are being circulated to all airports, harbors and border entry points.”

Police said there was a direct link between the attack at sea and the explosion of a car near the suburban port of Paleo Faliron a few hours before the City of Poros was to return to its mooring there.

Two people, thought to be a man and a woman, died in the blast. Debris from the car included an Iranian magazine and $2,700 in U.S. bills, as well as weapons, ammunition and grenade fragments identical to those investigators recovered from the ship.

Police believe the hapless terrorists in the car were supposed to have linked up with those on the ship. There were enough explosives in the car to have made the ship a floating bomb.

The 208-foot-long City of Poros is equipped with a radio-telephone, and the car explosion was big news in Athens on Monday afternoon. Greek officials believe that the terrorists aboard the ship were aware of the explosion and attacked despite the recognition that their original plan--whatever it was--could not be carried out.

One of the pictures released Tuesday was that of Hamoud Abdul Hamid, 36, whom police said rented a car July 4 showing a Lebanese passport. It was not clear if investigators believe Hamid to have been one of the terrorists who opened fire Monday afternoon about an hour after the jaunty blue-and-white painted ship cleared the island of Aegina and headed home.

The grenades, and perhaps fire bombs, set blazes on the ship as about 200 passengers leaped into the warm blue sea to escape raking fire from machine guns. One witness said he saw a terrorist unsling his machine gun from a backpack and pursue panicked passengers, deck by deck, screaming in what the witness believed was Arabic.

The second of the three photos was that of Mohammed Zozad, 21. Police said Zozad, an associate of Hamid, had been registered at the same hotel since May. Both men checked out July 8.

The presence of the two men in Greece since May, the care and detail with which Monday’s attack was planned and the large size of its armory effectively short-circuited early speculation here that it might have been a spur-of-the-moment response to the July 3 downing of an Iranian airliner by an American warship.

Rather, there was informed speculation that the planned beneficiary of the attack was to have been Mohammed Rashid, 34, a Palestinian arrested here June 1 for entering the country on a false passport.

The Greek government is known to be favorably disposed to a U.S. extradition request for Rashid, who is wanted for the 1982 bombing of a Pan American jet over Hawaii in which one person died and 15 others were injured. Rashid’s scheduled trial today--like all others in Greece for the remainder of this week--has been postponed because of a strike of jail guards.

Original reports in Monday’s confusion said there had been three terrorists, one of them masked. On Tuesday night, though, senior harbor officials said they believed there might have been four, two of them women.

Conflicting Reports

The third man whose picture was released Tuesday was not identified. Neither, amid conflicting reports of how the terrorists escaped, was there any public indication of where they might be hiding.

First reports said they had been picked up by a speedboat. There were later reports Tuesday, however, that they may have lost themselves among terrified passengers who remained on the smoking ship or those rescued from the sea by a volunteer flotilla.