Jailing "Bonnie And Clyde"

Accused Terrorist Georges Ibrahim Abdallah apparently has many friends in low places. Minutes after he was driven under heavy guard away from Paris police headquarters to the city's Sante prison, four other suspected terrorists were brought in. They arrived separately, at 15-minute intervals, crouched inside identical blue police vans with wire-mesh windows and police-car escorts. The four are reportedly acquainted with Abdallah, and their group is believed to have supplied him with weapons.

The suspects, two men and two women, were arrested last week at an isolated farmhouse in the Loire valley, 85 miles south of Paris, after reward-seeking informants tipped off police. Authorities also seized at the farmhouse an automatic rifle, six handguns, 60 lbs. of explosives and a list of a dozen names of presumed terrorist targets. Police say the four are members of Action Directe, a radical-leftist group formed in 1979.

Two of the four, Jean-Marc Rouillan, 34, and Nathalie Menigon, 30, are known as the "Bonnie and Clyde" of French terrorism, because of their brutal five- year reign as leaders of Action Directe. Rouillan is suspected of masterminding the murder of a French general in 1985, while Menigon and the second woman, Joelle Aubron, 27, had been sought for the assassination last November of the president of Renault, France's largest automaker. Action Directe is thought to have been responsible for as many as 80 terrorist attacks since 1981.

The arrests and indictments of the four on charges of possessing weapons and explosives were greeted as a major victory in the French war against terrorism. Exulted a headline in the daily newspaper Le Parisien: ACTION DIRECTE DECAPITATED AT LAST! Others, however, fear that the terrorist group may be Hydra-headed.