Clues linking the August 9, 1982 terrorist attack on a Jewish restaurant in Paris with a terrorist attack a year earlier on a Vienna synagogue, brought French investigators to Vienna today.
Judge Jean-Louis Bruguiere, the Paris magistrate heading the investigation of the machinegun attack which killed six persons and wounded 22 at the Jo Goldenberg restaurant on the Rue des Rosiers in the old Jewish quarter of Paris, will interrogate three Palestinian terrorists held in a Vienna prison. He and the two French police officers accompanying him, will also examine weapons the Austrian police seized from the terrorists.
The three are serving sentences for killing two people and wounding several others when they opened fire on worshippers leaving a Vienna synagogue on August 29, 1981. Two of the men, Hassan Marwan and Yunis Bahij, admitted to membership in the Abu Nidal group, a Palestinian splinter organization believed responsible for most terrorist attacks against Jews and others in Western Europe in recent years, and assassinating officials of the Palestine Liberation Organization.
The terror squad which struck in Vienna used WZ-63 Polish-made submachineguns similar to those used in the Rue des Rosiers attack. Police sources here said there were other similarities between the two attacks. The sources described the linkage as a possible breakthrough in the year-long investigation of the restaurant attack and indicated that the three terrorists incarcerated in Vienna might agree to cooperate.
Bruguiere has also visited Rome and Brussels where terrorists have attacked synagogues in recent years and has conferred with police officials in those cities in the course of his investigation.
Meanwhile, it was disclosed this week that two men who might have been connected with an explosion near a Marseilles synagogue last March 8 were arrested in Paris this week for questioning. The suspects were reported to have been in the company of the alleged perpetrators on the night of the explosion. The latter, Daniel Scotti and Jean Chicin, were killed when a bomb in their car detonated as they were fleeing police who had spotted them near the synagogue.
Scotti and Chicin were both known racketeers with long prison records. The two men picked up here, identified only as Monge and Marcel, also have police records for racketeering and armed burglary. Marseilles police believe the bomb incident was related to gang warfare although it may have been the work of an anti-Semitic group which contracted with underworld elements to bomb the synagogue.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
