Israeli Minister Arens Links Pan Am Crash, U.S. Opening to PLO

JERUSALEM — Moshe Arens, Israel’s new foreign minister, blamed “Arab terror” Friday for the tragic Pan Am jet crash in Scotland and said that the United States had encouraged terrorism by talking to the Palestine Liberation Organization.

Interviewed by Israel Radio as he formally took office at a ceremony in the Foreign Ministry, Arens declared:

“According to our assessment and the evaluation of experts at this moment, it is the work of international terror, apparently Arab international terror.”

The hawkish minister, a former Israeli ambassador to Washington, linked Wednesday’s air disaster to last week’s U.S. decision to begin a dialogue with the PLO, which Israel considers its chief enemy.

“We express great sorrow that our allies the United States, who once stood shoulder to shoulder with us against international terror, have forgotten . . . that the PLO is the premier terror organization,” he said at the ceremony.

“Any sort of recognition only encourages them and extremism,” he said.

Arens voiced sorrow over the deaths of the 258 passengers and crew aboard the fatal Flight 103 and as many as 22 people on the ground who were killed when the Pan Am jet disintegrated and crashed in Lockerbie, a small town in southern Scotland.

Israeli terrorism expert Ariel Merari of Tel Aviv University said he believes that the plane’s destruction was the work either of Palestinian extremists like Abu Nidal, or Syria or Libya, which reject any peace moves by PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat.

Merari said on Israeli army radio that those who rejected moves to establish peace in the Middle East are bent on sabotaging the diplomatic gains made by Arafat, who has won world attention for the moderate tone of his recent statements.

The United States ended a 13-year ban on talks with the PLO after Arafat renounced terrorism and recognized the existence of Israel earlier this month in Geneva.

Merari said radical Palestinian groups like Abu Nidal’s Revolutionary Council of Fatah or Ahmed Jibril’s Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command have records of such attacks.

“They have the motivation, they have the experience, the record of attacks on passenger planes exactly of this type,” he said.

U.S. officials disclosed Thursday that an Arab caller to the U.S. Embassy in Helsinki, Finland, on Dec. 5 said that Abu Nidal’s terrorists would try within two weeks to bomb a Pan Am flight originating in Frankfurt, where Flight 103 began. A member of a group with links to Jibril was arrested in October in Frankfurt, carrying hidden plastic explosives and a detonator.