U.S. Cites 70 Terrorist Acts Against Allies in January

The State Department said Thursday that there have been about 70 acts of terrorism against American and allied interests since the Gulf War began--11 of them in the previous 24 hours--but an official said Iraqi agents were involved in only three.

The incidents definitely ascribed to Iraqi agents were the bungled bombing of a U.S. library in Manila on Jan. 19 and unspecified Iraqi activity in Thailand and Tanzania.

Department spokeswoman Margaret Tutwiler, listing 11 attacks in the previous 24 hours on U.S. and coalition interests, said three were in Yemen, three in Peru, two in the Philippines and one each in Jordan, Lebanon and Chile.

“These incidents have resulted in property damage. So far the injuries have been relatively few,” said Tutwiler.

“We have a report of one death, a bank guard, at a bank in Lebanon on Jan. 23. Most of them have been . . . attacks conducted by indigenous groups which have carried out similar violence in the past,” she said.

A top FBI official said Thursday that the threat of terrorist attacks against Americans will linger long after the Gulf War ends.

“I tell our agents it’s like a mile or two-mile run. We’re only into the first lap,” Assistant FBI Director William Baker told a news briefing at the Justice Department.

An Iraqi was killed and another wounded in the Jan. 19 incident in Manila when a bomb they were trying to plant went off prematurely. The Philippine government later expelled two students, both sons of Iraq’s ambassador to Somalia.

Intelligence sources said they were part of a Baghdad-sponsored terrorist network in Asia.

The Thai authorities asked six Iraqi diplomats to leave last week after security forces discovered a cache of weapons brought in under diplomatic cover Jan. 19.

Also last week, the State Department advised American citizens to put off non-essential travel to Tanzania because of the Iraqi-sponsored plot against diplomats that it declined to describe.

Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein has threatened to unleash a wave of attacks against U.S. interests. However, so far, attacks have been scattered and have done little damage.

In Damascus, Syria, on Thursday, a radical Palestinian leader said his guerrillas might attack Western military targets in support of Iraq.

George Habash, head of the Marxist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, told an interviewer: “Frankly, while we stress that we don’t attack civilian targets because we are not terrorists, we hope that we are able to strike at any military target to help Iraq in this battle.”

Among the possibly Gulf War-related incidents reported late Wednesday and Thursday were the following:

In Amman, Jordan, a previously unknown Muslim fundamentalist group broke into the French Cultural Center overnight and started a small fire, police said.

French Embassy spokesman Francois Senemaud said the group, called the Jihad Brigades, claimed responsibility for the fire, which caused limited damage.

In Yemen, unidentified assailants fired three shots at the residence of the U.S. ambassador to Yemen and threw bombs at the residences of the Turkish and Japanese ambassadors, a Yemeni official said.

He said the attacks, the first in Yemen since the Gulf War began, caused only slight damage and no casualties. Turkey and Japan are among the nations allied against Iraq. Yemen has condemned the allies’ campaign war.

In Manila, an explosion apparently caused by a huge firecracker hit a building housing the offices of the Saudi Arabian Embassy. It caused no casualties or damage, police said.