Iraq Floats Possibility of More Freed Hostages : Gulf crisis: Baghdad attaches complicated conditions to its offer. Four ailing Americans arrive in Amman.

Iraqi leaders Saturday floated the possibility of conditional freedom for more Western hostages as four ailing Americans left Baghdad en route to the United States.

The Americans arrived Saturday night in Amman on an Iraqi Airways flight. They included Randall Trinh, 49, a Vietnamese-American from Hacienda Heights who was swept from hiding in Kuwait several weeks ago and taken to Baghdad.

Trinh, reportedly suffering from peptic ulcers and in need of surgery, walked into the Amman airport terminal on the arm of Roman Catholic Bishop Michael Kenny of Juneau, Alaska. The bespectacled Trinh, wearing a tan jacket and open-necked shirt, was smiling broadly but refused to talk to reporters.

The other Americans are Raymond Gales, a diplomat who had been stationed at the U.S. Embassy in Kuwait when the Iraqis invaded Aug. 2; Abdul Kanji, an Indian-born Muslim who has a medical practice in Glencoe, Ill., and Michael Barner of Alexandria, La.

Barner, 49, said he has no idea why he was released although he reportedly is suffering from cancer. Asked what was the worst part of his captivity, the tall, bearded Louisianian tapped his head and said, “The mind.”

In Baghdad, playing the hostage card to soften U.S.-led determination to force his army out of Kuwait, Iraqi President Saddam Hussein said an unspecified number of European workers will be permitted to leave Iraq.

He was responding to an appeal from Arab trade unionists, the Iraqi News Agency reported, and made the offer at a session of the National Assembly, Iraq’s rubber-stamp Parliament, which later approved his decision to free 700 Bulgarian civilians.

An estimated 2,000 Americans, Europeans and Japanese are believed to be trapped in Iraq and Kuwait. Scores of the men are held as “human shields” against the possibility of a military attack by Western forces in the Persian Gulf region.

Speaker Saadi Mahdi Saleh, also addressing the National Assembly, declared that Iraq might free all the remaining hostages under one of two conditions:

* “If two of the following states give guarantees not to resort to the military option.” He named the Soviet Union, France, Japan, Germany and China.

* If the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council promise “to keep away from a military settlement of the gulf crisis and (seek) a peaceful solution.”

Secretary of State James A. Baker III, en route from Washington to Bahrain to begin a seven-nation tour, declined to comment on Iraq’s reported offer regarding the hostages.

House Armed Services Committee Chairman Les Aspin (D-Wis.) discounted the offer.

“It’s no deal,” Aspin declared in a telephone interview from his Wisconsin home. “That’s no different from the proposal Saddam Hussein made to (French President Francois) Mitterrand and (Soviet President Mikhail S.) Gorbachev. He said if they would pledge not to use force in the gulf, he’d release their hostages. The message that should go back to him is that if he wants peace, all he has to do is get out of Kuwait and release all hostages.”

The United States and Britain are permanent members of the U.N. Security Council, along with the Soviets, French and Chinese. All five have voted unanimously for council resolutions demanding the unconditional withdrawal of Iraqi troops from Kuwait and the release of hostages.

But for the last three weeks, Hussein’s regime has tried to drive a wedge into the Western front, bidding particularly to split France and the Soviet Union away from the unequivocal U.S. and British positions. Iraq and its supporters in the Arab world, insisting that Paris and Moscow have taken softer positions, have showered them with praise.

The orchestrated focus on hostages will continue this week with the arrival of former Japanese Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone and former West German Chancellor Willy Brandt, the latest in a series of foreign political figures to go to Baghdad to seek release of their citizens held hostage there. Nakasone left Tokyo on Saturday; Brandt was expected to arrive Monday. There are about 400 German hostages and 239 Japanese.

On Saturday, the four Americans were released to representatives of the New York-based Fellowship of Reconciliation, a pacifist organization that sent a 21-member delegation to Baghdad on Oct. 20. Most left a week later, but Kenny, who was wearing full vestments on his arrival here, and a second man, Tarek Mohammed el Heneidy, stayed behind to bring out the four hostages.

Heneidy told reporters that members of the group “saw clear signs that peaceful solutions are very possible if the governments choose to do so.” He said the delegation had not been permitted to visit any of the reported 106 Americans held as human shields at potential military targets.

The four American hostages spent Saturday night in Amman and were expected to leave for the United States today.

Arriving in Amman aboard the same flight that brought out the Americans were a French captain and two noncommissioned officers who were captured by Iraqi troops last Monday when they strayed into Iraqi lines after losing their way in the Saudi Arabian desert. French forces are deployed there alongside American and other Western and Arab troops.

French officials here kept a lid of secrecy on the arrival and refused to release the names of the three men, who were taken to Baghdad after their capture. Iraqi Information Director Naji Hadithi said they were released “in appreciation of the special relationship with France.”

Baghdad officials said the three were captured when they crossed into Iraqi territory on a reconnaissance mission. In Paris, government officials termed the incident a blunder and were quoted as saying the soldiers could face disciplinary action on their return to France.

Meanwhile, Mohammed Hadid, vice president of Jordan’s Red Crescent, said arrangements have been completed to send representatives of the American and British Red Cross societies to Baghdad to set up a Christmas mail and parcel service for U.S. and British hostages.

The visit will mark the first contact between Western Red Cross agencies and the Iraqi Red Crescent. Red Crescent is the Muslim equivalent of the Red Cross.

The plight of the hostages has drawn attention away from the military confrontation in the gulf. Iraqi officials and newspapers daily decry what they term the imminent threat of a U.S.-led assault on their occupation army in Kuwait, which Baghdad has declared an Iraqi province.

Pressing to escape the military vise, Hussein’s government has demanded a political solution to the crisis while refusing American demands for a military withdrawal and restoration of the Kuwaiti emirate.

On Saturday, Iraqi Foreign Minister Tarik Aziz made a surprise visit to Amman for talks with Jordan’s King Hussein, who has begun another round of personal diplomacy in search of a peaceful settlement. Aziz told reporters he was carrying a message for the king from President Hussein.

King Hussein met this week with Sultan Kaboos ibn Said, the ruler of Oman, in the capital, Muscat. Amman officials said he was scheduled to leave today for Paris and talks with Mitterrand and later hoped to meet British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher at an ecological conference in Geneva.

Jordanian officials say the king has no specific plan but believes the crisis has reached an explosive point and wants to keep diplomatic contacts moving.

Meanwhile, a fourth American aircraft carrier and its task force moved into the gulf region in what will mark at least a temporary buildup of U.S. naval forces there.

The carrier Midway and its seven-ship battle group are due to replace a similar group headed by the carrier Independence, which is scheduled to leave its post in the Arabian Sea by the end of the week and return to San Diego.

At the same time, military officials in Saudi Arabia said Marines aboard the amphibious ship Raleigh stormed a remote beachhead in an undisclosed country Saturday in the first such exercise to be conducted inside the Persian Gulf.

Times staff writers Douglas Jehl in Saudi Arabia, Don Shannon in Washington and Norman Kempster in Shannon, Ireland, contributed to this report.