Editor’s Slaying Probed, Wife Says : Inquiry: The FBI would not comment on whether it is investigating death of Vietnamese American publisher, killed in 1987 arson fire in his newspaper office.

The FBI has opened an inquiry into the 1987 slaying of a Little Saigon publisher believed to have been killed because his magazine printed advertisements for companies that were doing business in Vietnam at a time when such actions were violently condemned by anti-Communists, the editor’s wife and best friend said Tuesday.

Tap Van Pham, who was widely known within the Orange County Vietnamese American community by his pen name, Hoai Diep Tu, was killed in an arson fire in his Garden Grove newspaper office eight years ago. An anti-Communist group, the shadowy Vietnamese Party to Exterminate the Communists and Restore the Nation, claimed responsibility for the fire in missives sent to local Vietnamese newspapers.

The New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists prepared a report last December, calling on the FBI and local authorities to renew efforts to investigate the murders of 10 immigrant journalists, including Pham, in the United States.

The FBI on Tuesday would not confirm whether an investigation is underway, but last month FBI agents met with several of Pham’s former friends and colleagues to inform them the agency was on the case, said Hoang Truong, one of those interviewed.

Mai Tran, Pham’s wife, said Tuesday she received a phone call two weeks ago from a man who identified himself as an FBI agent, notifying her the agency was looking into her husband’s death.

“I was happy to hear the FBI was interested, but I couldn’t help them much,” said Tran, who said the agents asked her whether her husband had enemies.

Tran was in Vietnam at the time her husband was killed. After her arrival in the United States four years ago, she revived Mai , the weekly magazine Pham founded.

Truong, Pham’s best friend, said the officials who met with him did not explain why they were interested in the case.

“Two agents asked me what I thought about [Pham’s] death, if I knew of any suspects,” said Truong, who saw Pham the night before he was killed. “I told them the only thing I knew, that it happened during a time when the political climate in our community was very strong and that [Pham] was aware that running an ad for a company doing business in Vietnam could be dangerous.”

The 45-year-old Pham had been threatened and vilified for publishing ads for three Montreal-based companies offering to send packages of merchandise to relatives in Vietnam.

Garden Grove Police Detective Al Butler, who had worked on the Pham case since 1989, said last December that a task force of FBI agents and local authorities worked for about a year to solve the slaying. But because of transfers and promotions, the task force dissolved without making much headway, he said.

Shortly before the fire in which he died, Pham “told me he was scared and I advised him not to print the ad,” recalled Truong, who traveled with Pham on the same boat to the United States in 1981. After Pham’s death, Truong and his family arranged for the editor’s wife and three children to immigrate to Orange County.

Some Vietnamese-language newspapers in Orange County later received letters from the Vietnamese Party to Exterminate the Communists and Restore the Nation, which claimed it had an “order to destroy” Pham’s office because of the advertisements.

Garden Grove police investigators verified the letters’ authenticity. But detectives, who found $80,000 in gold, jewelry and cash in the editorial offices that had also doubled as Pham’s home, did not rule out the possibility that the fire could have been the work of extortionists or the result of a personal grudge.

No arrests were made.