Israel has readily accepted denials by French Prime Minister Jacques Chirac and Chancellor Helmut Kohl of West Germany of a report that Kohl had suggested to Chirac that Israel, not Syria, may have masterminded a plot to blow up an E1 A1 airliner last April.
Chirac, whose initial disclaimer of a Washington newspaper report last week seemed equivocal to some observers, subsequently made more forceful denials, the latest before the French National Assembly Wednesday. Spokesmen for Kohl said the report was utterly false.
Premier Yitzhak Shamir said Tuesday, “We have no reason to doubt those denials,” and Minister-Without-Portfolio Ezer Weizman, who works out of the Foreign Ministry here, spoke in the same vein in the Knesset Wednesday.
The report, in the Washington Times, was of an interview Chirac gave the paper’s editor, Arnaud de Borchgrave. According to Borchgrave, the French Prime Minister spoke of conversations he had with Kohl and West German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher at a meeting of the European Economic Community (EEC) ministers. There, Chirac reportedly said, the two Germans intimated that Mossad, Israel’s secret service, working with Syrian dissidents, attempted to smuggle explosives aboard the airliner at London’s Heathrow Airport in an effort to discredit Syrian President Hafez Assad.
Nezar Hindawi, a Jordanian national, was convicted by a British court and sentenced to 45 years’ imprisonment for the crime. Britain subsequently broke diplomatic relations with Damascus, charging that the Syrian Ambassador in London and his staff acted in collusion with Hindawi.
Weizman, who was answering questions on the matter in the Knesset, on behalf of the government, noted that Chirac “in a lengthy conversation with the Israeli Ambassador on November 8, firmly denied the statements attributed to him regarding the Mossad and Hindawi.”
Weizman added that “a day earlier, Israel’s Charge d’Affaires in Bonn was called to the Foreign Ministry … and told that neither Kohl nor Foreign Minister Genscher had said the things attributed to them by the reporter.”
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