Terrorism Death At the Doorstep a

By Jennifer B. Hull

Once more blood flowed in a Paris street. Once again posters picturing suspected killers appeared in the City of Light. This time the victim was Georges Besse, 58, president of France's largest auto-manufacturing concern, state-owned Renault. Coming just two months after a wave of bombings in crowded commercial centers across Paris killed eleven and injured more than 160, the shooting of Besse outside his home last week shocked and saddened the nation. On Friday 2,000 mourners, headed by President Francois Mitterrand and Premier Jacques Chirac, attended a funeral service for the slain executive at the Hotel des Invalides, the site of Napoleon's tomb.

Besse's murder took place as another terrorist drama unfolded in a West Berlin courtroom. Opening amid tight security, the trial of Palestinians Ahmed Hasi and Farouk Salameh brought forward evidence that the Syrian government was linked to the March bombing in West Berlin of the German-Arab Friendship Society offices, which left nine people injured. The trial provided a bizarre sideshow. Screaming and gesturing wildly from behind a bulletproof screen, Hasi claimed that "voices, sounds and music" were being piped into his cell to make him confess. The frenzied defendant is the brother of Nezar Hindawi, a Jordanian who was convicted in London last month of trying to blow up an El Al airliner, allegedly with Syrian help. After the conviction, Britain broke off diplomatic relations with Syria.

Although it had no apparent connection to the Middle East's brutal politics of terror and revenge, the murder of Besse was particularly chilling. A highly respected executive, Besse was beginning to improve loss-riddled Renault's fortunes. He had had little involvement in politics and avoided the public spotlight, preferring instead to spend his free time tending the roses at his country home southwest of Paris. The businessman was just steps from his town house in Paris' Montparnasse district last Monday night when two women emerged from the shadows. "It's good, let's go!" one of them shouted. As horrified | passersby looked on, she fired three shots from a 9-mm pistol at Besse. "Get lost," barked the second woman, waving a gun at a stunned witness. "You haven't seen a thing." Then, as the Renault chief lay sprawled on the sidewalk, fatally wounded in the head, chest and shoulder, the assailants fled.

Chirac immediately rushed to the scene when he learned of the shooting. Ringed by scores of club-wielding police, the Premier expressed shock at "this bestial assassination." President Mitterrand, who was visiting the West African state of Burkina Faso, said France had "lost a No. 1" in the death of Besse, and he declared that "all our forces must unite against terrorism, without flinching and without compromise."

Shadowy Middle Eastern groups like the Committee for Solidarity with Arab and Middle Eastern Political Prisoners were apparently responsible for the September reign of terror. But not this time. Discovered in the Raspail Metro station near the scene of the murder were leaflets printed with the five- pointed star of Action Directe, a home-grown, radical leftist terrorist group that is committed to waging urban guerrilla war against "bourgeois imperialism." The tracts claimed responsibility for the shooting in the name of Action Directe "Commando Pierre Overney," a Maoist worker who was killed by police in 1972 during labor strife outside the main Renault factory in suburban Paris.

Criminal investigators pieced together a composite description of the two attackers, but the evidence was too vague to provide solid identification. Still, the leads seemed convincing enough for police to distribute nationwide some 80,000 wanted posters with photographs of Nathalie Menigon, 29, and Joelle Aubron, 27, two Action Directe militants. Interior Minister Charles Pasqua urged the nation to "cooperate with the police" in hunting down Besse's murderers, and he offered a 1 million franc ($152,000) reward for information leading to their capture.

Besse's death followed a series of murders of well-known European military and industrial leaders by indigenous terrorist organizations. In January 1985 Action Directe claimed responsibility for the death of General Rene Audran, a prominent French Ministry of Defense official. Days later, members of the West German Red Army Faction murdered Ernst Zimmermann, a Munich defense industrialist. Some experts believe the atrocities are linked, and point to a communique the two groups issued last year declaring they would form a "West European guerrilla movement." Last week French authorities were investigating a possible West German connection to the Besse slaying.

Since the joint communique was released, Action Directe, the R.A.F. and radical leftist sympathizers have staged at least 60 terrorist strikes in Western Europe. In Bonn last month a terrorist killing foreshadowed the Besse murder: gunmen ambushed Gerold von Braunmuhl, a senior Foreign Ministry official, as he was returning home from work. The groups' affinity for dedicating their acts to terrorist martyrs has strengthened the image of a coordinated network.

West European leaders acknowledge that the terrorist threat to their countries cannot be solved without a concerted effort. The day after Besse's murder, French Interior Minister Pasqua and his West German counterpart, Friedrich Zimmermann, agreed in a two-hour meeting to begin exchanging members of their antiterrorist liaison teams in an attempt to develop a regular flow of information between the two countries.

Meanwhile West German attention focused on the Hasi-Salameh case. The pretrial confessions read to the court pointed to Syrian involvement. Both defendants admitted that a suitcase bomb used in the Friendship Society attack last March had been obtained from the Syrian embassy in East Berlin. Hasi said a man he knew as Abu Ahmed gave him the bomb in the embassy kitchen. After the device twice failed to explode, a Syrian explosives expert was summoned from the embassy. A few days later the bomb went off.

The testimony concerning Abu Ahmed was intriguing. He appeared to be the same man whom British intelligence and security sources investigating the Hindawi case haveidentified as Lieut. Colonel Haitam Said, a Syrian air force intelligence officer.

Further links between Hindawi and Hasi emerged last week. Hasi's written confession described how Hindawi had helped arrange the Friendship Society bombing in West Berlin. Hasi said his brother had flown with Salameh to Damascus last January to discuss the attack with Syrian military intelligence officials. Hindawi made the trip, Hasi's statement said, after failing to receive Libyan support for his operations. In East Berlin, Fayssal Sammak, Syria's Ambassador to East Germany, labeled the confession "lies, pure lies."

The West Berlin tribunal is expected to reach a verdict in the trial next week. If convicted, Hasi and Salameh could face life prison sentences. The verdict may include a judgment by the court on whether Syrian authorities were involved in the bombing. At week's end Bonn had not decided what action it would take in the event of proof of Syrian complicity, though a source close to the government said a complete severing of ties with Syria would be unlikely. West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl's Cabinet is divided over the question of what it might do, and Kohl is still considering his position.

With reporting by Clive Freeman/West Berlin and Adam Zagorin/Paris