Red Cross Kidnapings Tied to Abu Nidal

Police said Monday that two Red Cross officials abducted last week are being held by radical Palestinian guerrillas led by terrorist mastermind Abu Nidal.

Abu Nidal’s group has denied taking part in the kidnapings.

“We have established that Abu Nidal’s men carried out the abduction. We believe the hostages are held in a base east of Sidon,” said a police spokesman, who declined to be identified.

He said the base is “between the villages of Majdaloun and Bkosta,” three miles east of Sidon, the provincial capital of southern Lebanon.

Abu Nidal Controls Area

“The area is controlled exclusively by Abu Nidal’s group,” the spokesman said.

Masked gunmen grabbed the two Swiss men, Emmanuel Christen, 32, and Elio Erriquez, 23, in Sidon on Friday, bundled them into the trunk of a car and drove off toward the Ein el Hilwa Palestinian refugee camp on Sidon’s southeastern outskirts.

The police spokesman said the kidnapers drove through Ein el Hilwa to their base east of Sidon. The refugee camp is controlled by Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization, which is at odds with Abu Nidal’s breakaway faction.

Asked whether police would attempt to rescue the hostages, the spokesman said: “We don’t have the necessary force to do that. We have investigators, but not a strike force.”

Government and police authority have been severely eroded by 14 years of civil war between Christians and Muslims, leaving power largely in the hands of militias.

Red Cross Noncommittal

Asked about Abu Nidal’s reported involvement in the abductions, Roland Sidler, chief delegate of the International Committee of the Red Cross in southern Lebanon, said, “We have no new information about our missing colleagues.”

Abu Nidal’s Fatah-Revolutionary Council issued a statement in Beirut on Saturday condemning the abductions and offering to help free the men, but police and the PLO have said they do not take the statement seriously.

Abu Nidal is the nom de guerre of Sabri Banna, who broke away from Arafat’s mainstream Fatah group in 1973. His faction has been blamed for a score of terrorist attacks, including the December, 1985, attacks on the Rome and Vienna airports.

Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of students in Lebanon flocked back to classes Monday as most schools and colleges reopened for the first time since shelling forced them to close in March.

All of Lebanon’s state schools, most private schools and the American University of Beirut reopened in the biggest sign that peace had returned to Lebanon since a cease-fire last month.

Lebanon has an estimated 600,000 schoolchildren. Official figures on how many returned Monday were not available.