U.S. Protests to Syria Over Envoy Incident

The United States has called on Syria to “close down all activities” of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command after members of the radical Palestinian faction, the main suspect in the Dec. 21 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Scotland, last week detained two American diplomats, officials said Thursday.

The State Department said that the U.S. Embassy in Damascus is relaying a strong protest and an official request to the government of President Hafez Assad “to take action against the PFLP-General Command to ensure there is no repetition of the incident and to end all the group’s activities” in Syria.

A Bush Administration official noted that the sweeping request was prompted not only by the incident involving the two embassy staff members but also “on the grounds that the PFLP-General Command has long engaged in terrorism and is responsible for several well-known past incidents.”

Detained for Eight Hours

The envoys, detained for eight hours on March 3, were reportedly military attaches posted at the U.S. Embassy. They were picked up near a PFLP-GC refugee camp while on what a U.S. source said was a “regular” tour of the area.

“They were only doing what they normally do,” the source said. “We suspect that (the PFLP-GC) got itchy and nervous about what Americans were doing there and suspected that they might be casing the camp for a retaliatory strike” for the bombing that killed all 259 aboard Pan Am’s New York-bound Flight 103 and 11 persons in the town of Lockerbie, where most of the plane’s debris fell.

The two unidentified Americans, who were unarmed, eventually were turned over to Syrian authorities, who returned them to the U.S. Embassy. State Department sources said there are, as yet, no plans to recall the two envoys who will “continue to carry out their assignments.”

The PFLP-GC has been headquartered in Damascus for almost seven years and is widely considered to be the largest, most active such group under Syrian sponsorship. Its leader, Ahmed Jibril, was born in Syria and is a former Syrian army captain, although he is from a Palestinian family.

The PFLP-GC has long been among the most militant Palestinian groups and has been associated with a string of terrorist incidents, including an airline bombing in the late 1960s. More than a dozen of its operatives, found in possession of explosives and detonators, were detained in Germany last October. Police suspected that they were planning to blow up a military train.

The renegade faction broke with Palestine Liberation Organization chief Yasser Arafat after the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, charging that he had betrayed the Palestinian movement because of his willingness to abandon Lebanon under a U.S.-orchestrated plan and because of his subsequent attempt to negotiate a diplomatic resolution of the Arab-Israeli conflict.

The State Department said that it will continue to hold Assad responsible for the safety of American officials accredited to Syria.