The Spreading Brushfire

Another kidnaping, even as the dead are mourned

Maurits ("Maupie") Caransa, 61, had been playing bridge with friends all evening at the Continental Club in the heart of Amsterdam. As the Dutch-Jewish millionaire businessman left the hotel shortly after 1 a.m. last Friday, he was seized by armed men, who hustled him into a waiting red sedan and sped away. Nine hours later an anonymous caller, speaking in German, telephoned the daily Het Parool with the message that Dutch police had been expecting and dreading: "This is the Red Army Faction. We have Caransa. You will hear from us."

A subsequent call demanded the abdication of Queen Juliana as ransom for Caransa. The caller also insisted on the release of West German Terrorist Knut Folkerts from a Maastricht prison cell in southern Holland. Police speculated that Caransa's captors might belong to the same gang of anarchists that kidnaped West German Industrialist Hanns-Mar-tin Schleyer in early September. Schley-er's body was found in the trunk of a car in Mulhouse, France, not far from the German border two weeks ago, shortly after West German commandos staged their daring rescue raid on a skyjacked Lufthansa jet in Mogadishu, Somalia (TIME cover, Oct. 31).-

Within hours of the rescue, three members of the Baader-Meinhof gang were found dead in their prison cells in Stuttgart--almost certainly as the result of a suicide pact. Their anarchist allies in the Red Army Faction took up the cry of "political murder," and West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt warned his countrymen to expect revenge:

"No one can regard himself as safe."

Not even, as things turned out, an affable Dutchman who had nothing to do with the high drama of the week before. The son of an Amsterdam oil and coal dealer, Caransa made his fortune by trading military surplus goods after World War II. Later he switched to real estate, and in time came to own several of the city's finest hotels. To his friends the warmhearted Caransa is known as a bridge enthusiast, a physical fitness addict, and a racing fan. To his kidnapers he may have seemed a suitable target because 1) he is one of Holland's richest men, and 2) he has often spoken out against his country's welfare laws.

Elsewhere as well, terrorist violence continued. At Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates, Iraq-based Palestinian gunmen accidentally killed the local Minister of State for Foreign Affairs, Seif Bin Ghobash. Their presumed target: Syria's visiting Foreign Minister, Abdul Halim Khaddam. In a remote region of northwestern Africa, guerrillas of the Polisario front, which is seeking independence for the former province of Spanish Sahara, kidnaped two French nationals in Mauritania, bringing to 13 the number of French hostages they are believed to be holding somewhere in Algeria. Following a special Cabinet meeting in Paris, French Defense Minister Yvon Bourges angrily denounced "this veritable act of piracy."

West Germany, meanwhile, was bury-.ng its dead. In Stuttgart, Chancellor Schmidt and 700 official mourners drawn from the ranks of government, business and labor attended a state funeral for Schleyer. As police sharpshooters perched on the rooftops of buildings that surrounded St. Eberhard's Church, President Walter Scheel in his eulogy described the struggle against terrorism as "the fight of civilization against barbarians." Declared Scheel: "If this flame is not smothered immediately, the brushfire will spread over the whole world."

Two days later 1,000 radical sympathizers and curiosity-seekers attended a graveside service, also in Stuttgart, for the three Baader-Meinhof gang suicides --Andreas Baader, Jan-Carl Raspe and Gudrun Ensslin. Once again police were there in force as West German radicals --some of them masked to conceal their identities--praised the dead prisoners as martyrs and chanted political slogans. A few carried banners: GUDRUN, ANDREAS AND JAN--TORTURED AND MURDERED AT STAMMHEIM.

Throughout the week West German police pressed their search for 16 terrorists wanted in connection with the Lufthansa skyjacking and Schleyer's kidnap-murder. Across the border French police were combing the area around Mulhouse--including the surviving concrete bunkers of World War II's Maginot Line, which would make excellent hiding places in the dense forests of Alsace.

All Germany, it seemed, was undergoing a security check. The government even sent its own security guards to 13 foreign airports that it regards as sloppily run --starting with Palma, Majorca, where the four hijackers had boarded the Lufthansa flight two weeks earlier. Bonn told Madrid flatly that unless the Germans were allowed to handle their own security, they would cancel all flights between Majorca and West Germany. Anxious to avoid such a blow to its tourist industry, the Spanish government reluctantly agreed.

Investigations were also continuing into the deaths of Baader and the other members of his gang; two had died of pistol wounds, the third by hanging. The state government of Baden-Wurttemberg, which runs Stammheim prison, issued a preliminary report. In the terrorists' cells, investigators had found hidden explosives, razor blades, a radio and homemade Morse code equipment. They theorized that when one prisoner, Raspe, had picked up the news of the Mogadishu raid on his secret transistor radio, he immediately passed the word to the others through Morse code signals. This, the investigators speculated, led the prisoners to carry out the carefully planned suicide pact.

The report did not explain satisfactorily how the prisoners had come into possession of pistols, knives, explosives and radios. It suggested that the items must have been smuggled in some time before the prisoners were put into solitary confinement following Schleyer's kidnaping. Another theory: prison guards had found the contraband but did not confiscate it, after being threatened with reprisals against their families. Such threats have been made before against Germans who have not wanted to help Baader-Meinhof gang members.

While a United Nations committee considered a resolution that would condemn skyjacking and require stricter airport security measures, West Germans were steeling themselves for still more attacks by the Red Army Faction or its allies in the international network of terror. Somewhere near Aachen, an illegal radio transmitter sputtered for a few minutes last week on the frequency used by the U.S. armed forces network. "Schleyer will not be the last," it promised. Calling for the "destruction of the imperialist, corrupt, rotten place that calls itself the Federal Republic of Germany," it continued: "Destroy all police stations, banks, city halls ... The fight continues. We will not stop until the last government official is wiped out." -

-According to reports from Beirut, all four hijackers were Palestinians associated with the notorious terrorist Wadi el Haddad. Three died in the Mogadishu raid; the fourth remained in a Somali hos-pitalJast week.

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