Libya Returns U.S. Flier’s Body, Gets Identity Wrong : Remains of Puerto Rican Pilot Flown to Rome in What Kadafi Regime Calls Humanitarian Gesture

The remains of a U.S. Air Force officer killed in the 1986 air attack on Libya were flown here Friday, but they apparently are not those of the flier named by the Libyan government.

The Libyans, in what they described as a humanitarian gesture, said they were returning the remains of Capt. Paul Lorence, the weapons systems officer of an F-111 bomber downed in the April 15, 1986, raid. But Pentagon sources said late Friday that forensic experts had identified the remains as those of Maj. Fernando L. Ribas-Dominicci, the plane’s commander and pilot.

Ribas-Dominicci, of Utuado, Puerto Rico, was 33 at the time of his death and a captain. He was posthumously promoted to the rank of major.

“A forensic identification has been performed and reveals that the remains are those of Ribas-Dominicci--and not those of Capt. Lorence,” one Pentagon source told the Associated Press. “We just got the word that it’s not the one they had claimed it was. We don’t know if they also ever found the remains of Capt. Lorence.”

Earlier in the day, the remains, in a gold-trimmed white coffin covered with the American flag and two wreaths of red and orange flowers, were delivered by a Libyan air force transport that put down at a military field south of Rome.

Six blue-uniformed members of the Italian air force helped the Libyan crew unload the coffin at Ciampino airport and placed it in a police mortuary van. Msgr. Giovanni Martinelli, the ranking Vatican diplomat in Tripoli, accompanied the coffin on its flight to Rome and turned it over to Italian officials at the airport.

Libyan Overture Seen

Observers here saw the Libyan move as a conciliatory overture by the country’s leader, Col. Moammar Kadafi. But in Washington, State Department spokesman Charles Redman said the return of the remains was only a belated performance of a “humanitarian obligation” that will not affect the tense relationship between the two countries.

The Reagan Administration has hinted at the possibility of using military force against what it charges is a factory that Libya is building to manufacture chemical weapons. Libya says the plant is for producing ordinary chemicals and medicines, but the United States pursued a high-profile rhetorical and diplomatic campaign to pressure Kadafi into dismantling the plant.

Then last week, two U.S. Navy F-14s from the carrier John F. Kennedy shot down two Libyan MIG-23 fighters. The United States said its planes were on routine patrol over international waters north of the Libyan coast when the Libyan warplanes closed to attack. It said the Navy pilots fired in self-defense. Libya called the incident an act of terrorism and premeditated aggression.

Now, warships of the U.S. 6th Fleet led by the Kennedy and another carrier, the Theodore Roosevelt, are conducting what a U.S. spokesman said are routine exercises in the Mediterranean. The spokesman said the exercises would be restricted to international waters, but Libya says they are still provocative.

Ribas-Dominicci and Lorence, a native of San Francisco who was 31 at the time of his death, were the crew of the only U.S. plane lost in the course of the 1986 raids against Tripoli and Benghazi. At the time, the Reagan Administration described the attacks as retaliation for Kadafi’s support of international terrorism, specifically the bombing of a discotheque in West Berlin that was frequented by U.S. servicemen.

The remains were examined by Italian pathologists at the Legal Medicine Institute of the University of Rome, according to U.S. Embassy spokesman Mark Dillen. They will be returned to the United States for burial, perhaps over the weekend.

At the State Department, Redman said that the United States did not talk directly with Libya before the remains were released.

“We welcome the return of the remains,” he said. “That was Libya’s humanitarian obligation.”

Asked if Washington considers the return to be a gesture of friendship by the Kadafi regime, Redman replied, “I don’t see anything further in that.”

“We first heard about this around Christmas time, when the Libyans talked to Vatican officials about their intentions,” he said. “The Vatican, of course, in turn, informed us. But then, we didn’t hear anything further until earlier this week.”

The Libyan government news agency Jana said the remains were being returned “in the framework of the humanitarian initiatives to which the great Fatah September Revolution (Libyan government) devotes a fundamental interest.”

Jana, the official voice of the Kadafi government, identified the remains as Lorence’s. It said they had been entrusted to Vatican delegate Martinelli at a Friday morning ceremony in Tripoli attended by government officials, the press and visiting European students.

In the 1986 raid, 18 Air Force F-111s, flying from bases in England, and 15 A-6 bombers from the carriers America and Coral Sea of the 6th Fleet in the Mediterranean, dropped about 100 tons of bombs on the Libyan capital and the port city of Benghazi. they were escorted by an unspecified number of A-7s and F-18s from the carriers. Libya said 40 people were killed in the raid.

Witnesses reported seeing one of the attacking planes crash into the sea, and the United States acknowledged that one of the F-111s had not returned. Several months later, pictures were shown on Libyan television of a body said to be that of Lorence. It was thought to have washed ashore.

Times staff writer Norman Kempster, in Washington, contributed to this story.