Nicaragua Dangerous Highways

Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega Saavedra says the U.S.-backed contras did it. The contras deny any responsibility. Nicaragua's political opposition says the Sandinistas may be accountable. Publicly the Bush Administration says Washington hasn't a clue who did it, but privately officials suggest it was renegade Miskito Indians in the area. On this much, however, all parties agree: the incident was, as one contra spokesman put it, "a monstrous and abominable crime."

Two Roman Catholic nuns, Sister Maureen Courtney, 45, of Milwaukee, and Sister Teresa de Jesus Rosales, a Nicaraguan in her early 20s, died last week in a bloody nocturnal ambush 200 miles northeast of Managua, as they drove in a pickup truck from the capital to a church meeting in Puerto Cabezas on the Atlantic Coast. Bishop Paul Schmitz, 46, an American wounded in the attack, . said a rocket-propelled grenade hit the hood of the white Toyota, and "everything just exploded." Automatic-rifle fire pierced the pickup, breaking Schmitz's arm. He and a fourth passenger, Nicaraguan Sister Francesca Colomer, 24, screamed that they were religious workers, and the gunfire stopped. But Schmitz never saw the assailants.

With tension already high between Washington and Managua, the politically tinged charges were hardly surprising. Long-strained relations soured further last month when the U.S. invaded Panama -- which the Sandinistas predictably denounced as Yanqui imperialism. To make matters worse, U.S. soldiers burst into the residence of the Nicaraguan Ambassador to Panama and searched it for weapons, a blatant violation of diplomatic immunity. Managua retaliated by expelling 20 American diplomats. Still bristling last week, Ortega drew a nasty parallel between the ambush and the November slaying of six Jesuit priests in El Salvador, a crime many believe was committed by the U.S.-backed Salvadoran army.

The stakes are high for the contras: if they are found culpable, that could sound the death knell for U.S. aid. But it is hard to see how the charges can be proved. A cooperative investigation by these two antagonistic nations seems unlikely.