Arrests at Last

EL SALVADOR

Break in a triple murder

It was the sort of assassination that has become a terrifying commonplace in war-torn El Salvador. One evening last January, two American labor lawyers, Michael Hammer and Mark David Pearlman, were having dinner in San Salvador's Sheraton Hotel with Jose Rodolfo Viera head of the country's controversial land reform program. Suddenly, two men armed with automatic pistols walked into the dining room and opened fire, killing the three men, then turned and unperturbedly walked out. Like thousands of other killings, these seemed destined to go unsolved. Last week, almost four months after the murders, there appeared to be a major break in the case.

FBI agents in Miami, acting on the request of the Salvadoran government, ar rested Hans Christ, 30, a Salvadoran businessman, for possible extradition in connection with the murders. His arrest followed the seizure in El Salvador a week earlier of Ricardo Sol Meza, 35, a wealthy industrialist and, significantly enough, part owner of the San Salvador Sheraton. The arrests were based in part on the testimony of a hotel waitress who had witnessed the murders.

At a preliminary hearing in Miami last week, Christ vehemently maintained his innocence, though he admitted having dined in the hotel that night and having been joined afterward by Sol Meza, a relative by marriage. When the shooting occurred, Christ said, he ran to the dining room from another part of the hotel Despite his protestations, Christ remained in a Miami jail pending another hearing this week.

The killings of four other Americans in El Salvador-- three nuns and a lay worker who were found shot to death near the international airport last December--are still under investigation by the Salvadoran government, with precious little to show for it. The FBI and other independent investigators have amassed a quantity of evidence, including 16 sets of fingerprints taken from the nuns' vehicle and ballistics tests on the bullets that killed the women. Many of these clues point to the possible implication of members of the Salvadoran security forces, who were on highway patrol near the airport that night. Some of these men have now been fingerprinted, but no actual arrests are believed to be imminent. "We keep talking to the government about the case," said a U.S. embassy official, "and we consider it very much open." But he admitted that the pace of the progress is "glacial."

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