Ominous Threat a la Turca

By Sara Medina

Spain's rightists hope to provoke a coup by the military

It began as a taut suspense drama. A band of hooded, heavily armed terrorists invaded the ground-floor offices of Barcelona's Banco Central, taking some 200 hostages and demanding the release of four army and Civil Guard officers who were under arrest for their roles in last February's attempted military coup. They threatened to kill the hostages and blow up the bank if their demands were not met. After a 37-hour siege, crack squads of special police moved in to capture the terrorists and free the hostages.

But evidence quickly mounted that the bank raid was only the first step of a plot against Spain's faltering democracy. After questioning the captured terrorists, Barcelona police hurried to a carpenter's shop in the Calle de Casanova. There they uncovered a newly dug, 10-ft.-long tunnel leading toward the Avenida Diagonal, a major thoroughfare along which King Juan Carlos and a huge armed forces day parade were to pass six days later. The shop had been rented by one of the bank raiders, Jose Maria Cuevas Jimenez, the one person to die in the police attack. By tunneling a few yards farther, the terrorists could have breached the sewer system and placed a bomb directly beneath the spot where the King, the strongest defender of Spain's four-year-old representative government, was to pass.

The questions--and the air of mystery --began to build. From the start, government officials had been convinced that members of the Civil Guard had been involved in the bank raid because of the terrorists' discipline, and the fact that some carried regulation machine guns. The terrorists also addressed their leaders only as "No. 1," "No. 2," or as "Mi primero" (My chief), in military parlance. The government sent the Civil Guard commander to negotiate with the terrorists and assure them that they would get "military treatment," a hint of leniency in a court-martial, if they would surrender. But there were no military men at all among the nine terrorists who were captured. The rest of the two dozen originally estimated by the government to have taken part in the raid apparently managed to escape by mingling with the hostages.

In the confusion, the government called the bank raiders "common criminals and anarchists," and named as "No. 1" Juan Jose Martinez Gomez, 25, a man with a record as a bank robber and anarchist. The latter allegation quickly backfired, however, as the anarchist headquarters said Martinez had been publicly identified by them in 1977 as a police spy.

As to the all-important question of who masterminded and bankrolled the operations, the government claimed that ten days before the raid an extreme right-wing paymaster--not further identified --offered each terrorist 5 million pesetas (about $55,000) at a dinner in Perpignan, France, just across the frontier. But that did not account for the fact that the carpenter's shop had been rented five weeks before by a member of the gang.

Faced with these questions, Prime Minister Leopoldo Calvo-Sotek>last week told the Cortes, the country's parliament, that "we do not know" who was behind the bank raid. Some high officials believe, however, that members of the political underworld are being recruited and trained for terrorist operations with military or police connivance, and that the financiers are wealthy supporters of the old Franco regime, who are deliberately trying to destabilize Spain. As the evidence mounted, Prime Minister Calvo-Sotelo finally admitted that the bank raid was "not an isolated action of common criminals."

This is precisely what Madrid politicians fear most. For months there has been talk among the military and right-wing civilians about simultaneously ending both the constant threat of terrorist acts by Basque separatists and the bothersome problems of Spanish democracy a la turca--in the style of the tough Turkish generals who took over their country last fall.

Since the right-wing coup attempt in February, Calvo-Sotelo's Union of the Democratic Center government, fearing the wrath of the military, has not moved decisively against the arrested officers. Calvo-Sotelo believes that any attempt to neutralize the generals' political influence will simply provoke more outbreaks of right-wing terror, perhaps culminating in a successful coup that would indeed bring the military and its allies to power a la turca.

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During an airline hijacking, the passengers are usually cowed and careful. But last week, after four young, armed Turks, members of a leftist terrorist group, diverted a Turkish Air Lines DC-9 to Bulgaria and demanded the release of 47 of their comrades in Turkish prisons, the hostages boldly decided to strike back. By the second day, according to the plane's pilot Barlas Akidil, "we had received several signs from the passengers that they were very eager to get rid of the terrorists."

The crew and passengers grabbed their chance after two of the hijackers were enticed out of the plane and seized. Akidil started the engines and moved the plane forward, then suddenly jammed on the brakes. As the two remaining gunmen tumbled in the aisles, Akidil and his co-pilot overpowered one, and a group of passengers swarmed over the other, despite the fact that his desperate shots wounded five of them. One angry passenger finally knocked out the terrorist with a bottle, and Flight 104 was safe again.

--By Sara Medina.

Reported by Lawrence Malkin/Barcelona and Mehmet Ali Kislali/Ankara

With reporting by Lawrence Malkin/Barcelona, Mehmet Ali Kislali/Ankara

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