Terrorism Danger Has Eased, U.S. Says

The State Department announced Monday that the danger of Iraqi-sponsored terrorism has eased, but it cautioned that there may still be attacks during what it calls the “postwar period.”

Relaxing the global terrorist warning that was issued on the eve of the Gulf War, State Department spokeswoman Margaret Tutwiler said, “There is currently no specific and credible information on a terrorist threat to the American public.”

Despite the State Department’s reassuring statement, an FBI spokesman said the bureau does not feel that the terrorist threat is over.

“We’re still maintaining the same alert that we had during hostilities,” said chief FBI spokesman Tom Jones. “The end of hostilities certainly doesn’t mean an end to the threat.”

One State Department source said the statement was issued because “there was a concern about people overreacting, canceling flights to Europe and New York City and so forth.” At the same time, this source said, U.S. officials wanted to remind the public that “there could still be terrorism down the road.”

U.S. officials point out that it sometimes took five or six months for professional terrorist organizations to plan and carry out attacks. For example, a bomb exploded aboard Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in December, 1988. The Lockerbie attack was believed to have been in retaliation for the shooting down of an Iranian airliner over the Persian Gulf by a U.S. naval warship on July 3, 1988.

“Previous wars in the Middle East have frequently been followed by a terrorist aftermath,” said Tutwiler at the State Department news briefing on Monday. She said U.S. officials will cooperate with other governments to make sure that new security measures adopted before or during the Gulf War will be kept in place.

But she made it clear that, so far, the amount of terrorism has been much less than had been anticipated or feared at the beginning of this year.

On Jan. 11, less than a week before the war began, the State Department warned that in case of military action involving the United States, “the threat of terrorism against Americans would increase significantly.”

Since the beginning of the war, U.S. officials said that there have been approximately 160 terrorist incidents around the world. About half of these were directed against American targets overseas. No incidents occurred inside the United States.

“They were largely concentrated in southeastern Europe and in the Andean region of South America,” Tutwiler said. “. . . The vast majority of the incidents were uncoordinated, low-level bombings that caused no injuries and only slight property damage.”

According to the State Department’s figures, one American died and three were wounded in these terrorist attacks.

Meanwhile, Tutwiler said she knows of no plans to remove Syria from the State Department’s list of countries that sponsor terrorism. On Sunday, Secretary of State James A. Baker III said Syrian President Hafez Assad had acted to restrain terrorists from attacking Western targets during the Gulf War.

Times staff writer Ronald J. Ostrow contributed to this article.