Alarm Raised Over Missing Libyan Dissident : Mideast: Observers fear intimidation campaign by Moammar Kadafi. U.S. intervention indicates heightened concern.

On the eve of the fifth anniversary of the Pan Am Flight 103 bombing, the United States may be facing a new challenge from Libyan strongman Moammar Kadafi, this time in the form of a heightened campaign against Libyan dissidents with American connections.

Over the last week, the Clinton Administration has appealed to the Egyptian government “at many levels,” even to the office of President Hosni Mubarak, to intervene in the case of missing Libyan dissident Mansur Kikhiya, U.S. officials said Thursday.

Kikhiya, one of the Arab world’s leading human rights activists and a former Libyan foreign minister, disappeared on Dec. 10 in Cairo.

Based on information from Arab diplomats, family members and other Libyan exiles now believe that Kikhiya, a permanent resident of the United States who is due for citizenship in the spring and whose wife and two children are American citizens, was abducted and returned to Libya.

The United States has been unable to confirm that Kikhiya is in Libya, but his weeklong absence has increased concern.

Kikhiya is diabetic, and his health depends on regular insulin injections.

Kikhiya, once a United Nations representative of the Kadafi government, broke with Kadafi more than a decade ago and has since been a high-profile opponent.

A week before his disappearance, he met in Cairo with John Shattuck, assistant secretary of state for human rights, to brief him on the human rights situation inside Libya.

The U.S. intervention is based on both concern about Kikhiya and alarm about the political implications.

“We’re deeply concerned that if Kadafi is doing this, he is upping the ante toward the opposition. He’s been making much more threatening statements about dissidents recently,” a senior U.S. official said.

“If Kikhiya was abducted, it would mark a new phase in his behavior toward dissidents. He would be changing tactics--and taking risks that raise interesting questions.”

If Libyan agents did abduct or harm Kikhiya, the operation would almost certainly have been run by Abdullah Sanoussi, Kadafi’s brother-in-law and head of Libya’s external intelligence operation, U.S. sources said.

U.S. and European intelligence officials believe that Sanoussi was a mastermind of the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 on Dec. 21, 1988, which killed 270 people, and the Sept 19, 1989, bombing of a UTA flight over Chad that killed 171.

Kadafi’s motive for a new campaign against dissidents may be partly linked to the largest conference of Libyan dissidents ever assembled, which was held in Washington last month, according to both U.S. sources and dissident Libyans. The two-day meeting was organized by Henry Schuler, a Libyan expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.

Kadafi is known to be upset about the conference, which focused on post-Kadafi Libya.

But it also follows new sanctions imposed last month by the United Nations after Libya refused to hand over two of its nationals indicted in the West for the Pan Am bombings. The Clinton Administration spearheaded the drive to tighten the squeeze against Kadafi and the intelligence apparatus that keeps him in power.

The case came quickly to the White House’s attention through both Shattuck and Kikhiya’s cousin, who shares the same name and is an acquaintance of National Security Adviser Anthony Lake.

The incident, if it is a kidnaping, recalls Libya’s wave of terror during the early 1980s, when opponents of the regime were frequently assassinated in foreign capitals. An attempt to kidnap so prominent a figure in Egypt, which is allied with the United States and historically friendly to Libyan opposition groups, would represent a new level of audacity in the regime, analysts say.

Since heightened U.N. sanctions took effect aimed at forcing Libya to hand over two suspects wanted in the 1988 Pan Am bombing, Kadafi has shown an increasingly defiant face to the world, threatening to eliminate Libyan opposition abroad and lay down the Libyan “masses” as a physical barrier against the threat of foreign invaders.

The disappearance in Egypt comes at a time when the Egyptian government has been an increasingly reluctant host to Libyan opposition groups, a policy that opposition leaders say is motivated both by Cairo’s desire to support the Kadafi regime and by business links that are blooming between Egypt and Libya, as Libya becomes increasingly isolated from the rest of the world.

“All of the Libyan opposition figures know they are under constant surveillance of (Egypt’s) mukhabarat (secret police) when they are in Egypt. So this could not have happened without the connivance, either officially, which I frankly think is the case, or through the payoff of the right couple of mukhabarat officers,” Schuler said.

For more than three years, the Washington-based Libyan Human Rights Commission has been trying to get information about two Libyan political exiles reportedly detained in Egypt since March of 1990. Commission officials say they have received reliable reports that the two men, Ezzat Yousif Maqrif and Jaballah Hamid Mattar, were handed over to Libya.

Amnesty International was told by the Egyptian government that neither man is in Egypt.

Egyptian government officials have opposed the escalating international sanctions against Libya and have argued to the United States that it is more productive to talk to Kadafi than to isolate him. Several opposition sources said Kikhiya had been contacted repeatedly in recent weeks by an intermediary representing Kadafi’s cousin, Ahmed Kadaf Dam, who reportedly was seeking to meet Kikhiya in the Tunisian resort town of Djerba near the Libyan border. He had declined, expressing fears to his friends that he could easily be kidnaped at the remote resort so near Libya.

Mohammed Makhlouf, of the dissident National Front for the Salvation of Libya, said Kikhiya told a friend that it was a Libyan government intermediary with whom he was scheduled to meet the night he disappeared.

“He mentioned to a close friend that the Libyan government had approached him through somebody to meet him, a mediator to speak to him at that time. And then he disappeared,” Makhlouf said.

Kikhiya’s wife, Baha, said she had spoken to her husband last Friday afternoon and that he told her he had booked his flight to return to Paris on Sunday.