ATF Probes Arson at Black Church in N.C.

Fire investigators used dogs Friday to try to sniff out clues to an arson that destroyed a 93-year-old wooden sanctuary, the 30th fire at a Southern black church in the past year and half.

Federal investigators on the scene stopped short of saying whether the fire Thursday night was related to the previous burnings.

The building, which dated to 1903, was used only to store old pews and other things on the grounds of the Matthews-Murkland Presbyterian Church. The mostly black 175-member congregation worships in a new building 100 yards away.

The church was planning to renovate the building and use it as a wedding chapel or for other community activities. It estimated the loss at $150,000.

Investigators said the fire had been set. They did not say how.

“We won’t say it’s connected to the series of fires, but we’re just getting information from the scene,” said Mark Logan, agent in charge for the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms.

Meanwhile, President Clinton and other top administration officials will try to reassure the nation and black ministers this weekend that every effort is being made to solve a rash of fires at Southern black churches.

Clinton told reporters Friday that he would discuss the topic in his weekly radio address today. Atty. Gen. Janet Reno and other administration officials will meet Sunday at the Justice Department with civil rights leaders and some of the black ministers whose churches have been burned or desecrated.

Clinton was expected to announce that the Treasury Department would increase the number of agents assigned to the effort and to describe the investigation’s high-level coordination, administration officials said.

Five people have been arrested in previous fires.

According to a tally of cases that the ATF considers “open,” six black churches have burned in Tennessee, five each in Louisiana, South Carolina and Alabama, four in North Carolina, three in Mississippi and one each in Virginia and Georgia.

The Southern Poverty Law Center of Montgomery, Ala., filed a lawsuit Friday seeking damages from the Ku Klux Klan for the burning of the Macedonia Baptist Church in South Carolina last June 21.