Now, Arabs as Targets

The Sinai accord was roundly denounced by the more extreme Palestinian liberation groups, who believe that Egypt's President Sadat has sold them out. Last week some hard-line but amateurish militants went so far as to attack the agreement through an assault on one of Sadat's own diplomats. Though the seizure of Ambassador Mahmoud Abdel Ghaffar and two aides in Egypt's Madrid embassy ended in total failure 16 tense hours after it had begun, it did set an ominous precedent as the first use of Palestinian terror tactics against Egypt.

It was late morning when four men in their twenties marched into the eight-story building housing the embassy, in the fashionable Salamanca section of Madrid. Carrying pistols, they burst into the embassy on the second floor. Madrid police wisely made no attempt to test the terrorists' threat to kill the three men they had seized as hostages: Ambassador Ghaffar, the press attache Mohammed Aziti and the consul. The terrorists claimed to belong to a Martyred Abdel Khader Husseini Group, named after a Palestine liberation fighter. The group is thought to be composed of militants from the "rejection front," which is opposed to a negotiated settlement with Israel. They telephoned their demands to a Spanish news agency. Describing the Sinai accord as "treason against the Egyptian people," they said they would kill their hostages if Sadat did not repudiate the Sinai agreement and abandon implementation talks on the accord that are underway in Geneva. The Iraqi and Algerian ambassadors, later joined by those from Jordan and Kuwait, rushed to help their captive colleague. They communicated with the terrorists by passing notes under a door.

Volunteer Hostages. Sadat's reaction was swift and strong. He denounced not the Sinai accord but the terrorists, and instructed his ambassador in Beirut to enlist the help of Palestine Liberation Organization Chairman Yasser Arafat in ending the incident peacefully. Arafat sent a message to the terrorists pointing out that an operation such as theirs did not serve the Palestinian cause. Meanwhile, Sadat had agreed to have them flown to Algiers if they did not harm their captives. The kidnapers agreed. When an Algerian Ilyushin-18 arrived in Algiers at 3:30 a.m., the three Egyptians, plus the Iraqi and Algerian ambassadors, who had gone along as volunteer hostages to the terrorists, were released unharmed.

The P.L.O. dissociated itself from the operation, and Sadat vowed he would not be intimidated or "terrorized" by this or any other anti-Egyptian demonstration to change his policy. The incident, however, underlined the differences within the P.L.O., contrasting Arafat's relatively moderate point of view with the harder revolutionary line of George Habash and other adherents of the "rejection front," which includes not only the more militant fedayeen groups but Libya and Iraq as well.

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