Finnish Police Question 2 Men on Links to Crash

HELSINKI, Finland — Police here questioned two men Friday in connection with Wednesday’s crash in Scotland of a Pan Am airliner in which 258 people aboard perished.

One of the men is believed to have warned U.S. authorities of a planned airliner bombing and the other is the man who the first said would organize the attack.

But police spokesman Seppo Tiitinen said that neither is being held.

“We have not found anything which can confirm a connection between these two incidents,” he said.

A telephone caller warned the U.S. Embassy in Helsinki on Dec. 5 that an attempt would be made to bomb a Pan Am airliner flying from Frankfurt to the United States. Sabotage is suspected in Wednesday’s Pan Am crash.

Tittinen said the Arab caller said that a Finnish woman would unknowingly carry the bomb aboard and that the attack would be carried out in the name of the radical Revolutionary Council of Fatah, led by terrorist Abu Nidal. (British news reports Friday identified one name on the list of fatal victims of the crash as that of a Finnish woman.)

The caller named another Arab living in Finland as the organizer of the alleged attack, but Tiitinen said that police are satisfied the man named has no connection with terrorism.

Tiitinen said that police believe the caller to the U.S. Embassy was an Arab who had made several similar calls to the Israeli and American embassies in Helsinki since January warning of bombs on airliners on various routes.

In each case, the man said that a Finnish woman would carry the bomb and named the same Arab as the organizer. Tiitinen said that all threats were checked and found to be “nonsense.”

Both the suspected caller and the man named have been questioned, he said. Both came to Finland after marrying Finnish women, and there is no evidence either have links to terrorism. “Rather, it could be that these men have some personal dispute,” Tiitinen said.