Terrorism No Deals

Ever since Mohammed Ali Hamadei was arrested at Frankfurt airport last January after bottles of liquid explosive were found in his luggage, the West German government had been in a quandary. At first there was hope that the Lebanese terrorist suspect would be extradited to the U.S., where he and three others are wanted for the 1985 hijacking of a TWA jetliner from Athens to Beirut and the murder of a passenger, U.S. Navy Diver Robert Stethem. But when two West Germans were kidnaped in Beirut a few days after Hamadei's arrest, the government began temporizing. Last week, despite months of U.S. pressure, Chancellor Helmut Kohl announced that Hamadei would be tried in Frankfurt.

Though no West Germans were involved in the hijacking, the government asserted that Hamadei could be prosecuted for murder and air piracy under international antiterrorism conventions. The maximum sentence for murder is life imprisonment.

The day after Kohl's announcement, U.S. Attorney General Edwin Meese traveled to Bonn for consultations. Meese came away satisfied, he said, that there will be no future deal to exchange Hamadei for the kidnaped West Germans. President Reagan repeated those promises in a telephone call to Patricia Stethem, mother of the murdered diver.

In Lebanon, meanwhile, the U.S. suffered another disappointment. After a week of threats and pressure from Syria, Shi'ite Muslim extremists released Ali Osseiran, the son of Lebanese Defense Minister Adel Osseiran, a Shi'ite political ally of the Syrians.' But the terrorists did not free Charles Glass, an American television journalist who was abducted a week earlier along with Osseiran. Brigadier General Ghazi Kenaan, intelligence chief for the 7,500 Syrian troops that occupy most of the Muslim half of Beirut, had said he would free both Glass and Osseiran "at all costs." Late in the week he began restricting the movement of Hizballah activists in the Shi'ite suburbs of Beirut in preparation for possible military action. Speaking of the extremists, a commentator on Damascus radio said, "Their strongholds are not impenetrable. They shall be reckoned with."

In Washington, White House officials disclosed last week that Syrian President Hafez Assad had accepted a written proposal from President Reagan for high-level talks on a variety of issues. The U.S. envoy to Damascus is likely to be Ambassador to the United Nations Vernon Walters.