U.S. Missionary Slain in S. Lebanon : Terrorism: He ran a home for handicapped children. A leftist group claims responsibility.

An American missionary who ran a home for handicapped children in southern Lebanon has been shot and killed by masked men, officials reported Wednesday.

The victim, a fundamentalist Christian layman, was identified as William Robinson, 56, who reportedly came to the Middle East seven years ago from the Chicago area.

Press reports from Lebanon said Robinson was killed Tuesday night by three intruders who broke into his home in Rachaiya el Foukhar, a village on the edge of the Israeli security zone near Mt. Hermon. Robinson’s wife Barbara, his four sons and the Lebanese children were in the house but were not injured.

Officials of the United Nations peacekeeping force in the area and a Christian missionary administrator in Jerusalem confirmed the reports. Later Wednesday, a telephone caller to a news agency in Beirut claimed responsibility for the killing in the name of the Lebanese National Resistance Front, a group composed of the Lebanese Communist Party and other small leftist parties.

In Washington, State Department spokeswoman Margaret Tutwiler said Robinson and his family had been warned repeatedly to leave Lebanon because of the extreme danger to Americans living in the area.

She said the State Department refused twice in recent months to validate Robinson’s passport for Lebanon because of the danger. U.S. passports are not valid for travel to Lebanon without a special endorsement.

Nevertheless, Tutwiler said, “we deplore this act of terrorism against an American citizen.”

Villagers in the area told reporters that Robinson, who had operated the childrens’ home since 1985, was planning to buy more land to establish a home for the elderly. Shiite Muslims in the area, about five miles east of Marjayoun, believed the American intended instead to establish a Jewish settlement on the land, and Robinson had been swamped in controversy over his aims for several weeks.

“One of our units on Tuesday night carried out the death sentence against William Robinson, who was working to set up Israeli settlement on Lebanese soil and to settle Jews there,” declared the Beirut caller who said he spoke for the leftist front.

Local Lebanese newspapers, in their Tuesday editions, carried a statement from the Shiite villagers in the area declaring that they would “resort to all methods and means to preserve their land and rights.” And Lebanese radio had broadcast complaints made by local villagers.

Israeli officials have denied knowledge of any settlement plan.

“The Northern Command doesn’t even know who this joker is. We have no connection with this guy at all,” said Israeli army spokesman Moshe Fogel. Soldiers from the Israeli army’s Northern Command patrol the security zone along with a Lebanese militia called the South Lebanon Army, which is supplied and funded by Israel. The zone is designed to thwart terrorist infiltrations across Israel’s northern border.

However, other Israeli military officials said authorities were aware of the controversy surrounding Robinson. They said they had commented to each other that Robinson was living on borrowed time, but it is not clear whether they warned him.

Reported details of the killing were contradictory. According to some accounts, Robinson was shot three times by black-masked gunmen carrying pistols. Others said the killers carried Kalashnikov assault rifles.

His widow was quoted as saying she was ordered to take the children into another room and then she was tied to a chair. The intruders fired some sort of knock-out gas into the room, and the first to awaken was her 7-year-old son, who went looking for his father and found him shot to death, lying in the bathtub, according to this account. The gunmen looted the house of cash and jewelry, the report said.

William F. Wolford, head of the International Christian Embassy, a pro-Israeli, fundamentalist missionary support organization in Jerusalem, told a reporter he had spoken to Robinson’s wife, also an American. She told him that masked men entered their home, tied her up and shot her husband, he said. She gave no other details because of shock, he said.

He rejected Lebanese leftist accusations that Robinson planned to set up a Jewish settlement. “They claimed Bill worked for the CIA, the KGB (Soviet secret police), the (Israeli) Mossad,” he told reporters. “But he was only trying to help orphans and handicapped children. He was not even pro-Israeli. He was not particularly sympathetic to Israel.”

Robinson was a former Marine, and he occasionally brought retarded Lebanese children from the home into Israel for treatment. Lebanese reporters quoted sources as saying 29 children were under Robinson’s care in the home, an abandoned school in the village.

American fundamentalists have long been active in the Israeli security zone, a 6-to-10-mile-wide strip on Israel’s northern border.

A source at the Northern Command said that “several” Americans live inside the security zone. Spokesman Fogel said it is “easy” for foreigners to cross the Israeli border into Lebanon.

“If you have a passport, you can get in,” he said. “I can’t say for sure he did not come in from Israel. We don’t interfere.”

However, it would be unusual for Israel not to know of activities within the zone. Journalists, for instance, are escorted and kept under close guard when they travel to the volatile area. For several months, foreign reporters have been barred by Israel from entering to travel even under U.N. escort.

Times staff writers Daniel Williams, in Jerusalem, and Norman Kempster, in Washington, contributed to this story.