The Soviet government lodged a strong protest with the United States yesterday against attacks on Soviet offices in New York. U.S. Ambassador Jacob Beam was summoned to the Foreign Ministry where he was handed the protest note by Vasily V. Kuznetsov, the First Deputy Foreign Minister. The protest was occasioned by a bomb explosion last Thursday in the Manhattan offices of Amtorg, the Soviet trading company. Rabbi Meir Kahane, the Jewish Defense League’s national chairman, denied that his group was responsible for the Amtorg bombing but expressed sympathy for the perpetrators. The State Department condemned the bombing “in the strongest possible terms.” Department spokesman Charles Bray called it ” an action of misguided individuals” which, he warned, “not only threatens to injure many innocent people but hampers our own efforts to influence the Soviet government to permit freer emigration and end both cultural and religious discrimination.” Bray said, “I don’t believe we have any idea who precipitated this attack,” adding that the State Department was “not implicating anybody.” The U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, George Bush, condemned the bombing as an “outrageous, barbaric and cowardly” incident. Yesterday’s Soviet note made no accusations against any group.
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