Bomb explodes at airport as Giscard arrives

Press, 18 April 1981, Page 8

Bomb explodes at airport as Giscard arrives

NZPA v Ajaccio, Corsica Two bombs exploded yesterday 'ip the crowded airport terminal in Ajaccio, the capital of the French Mediterranean island of Corsica, injuring eight people. President Valery Giscard d’Estaing said those reponsible were cowards. The bombs went off as the President arrived on a reelection campaign visit through the island. “It was a cowardly attack,” he told an election rally. Eight people were seriously injured and a 19-year-old boy has been flown to hospital in Marseilles in critical condition.

The President said the victims were four Corsican women and four male Swiss tourists. The police blamed Corsican separatists for the bombs — one hidden in a left-luggage locker and the other in a lavatory — which exploded as the President’s plane was approaching the terminal. They said they received an anonymous call moments before the blasts went off but there was not time to evacuate the building.. The President was the last main candidate to come to Corsica seeking votes in the two-round presidential election starting tomorrow week.

The police said they thought the attack was the work of the Corsican National Liberation Front (F.L.N.) but they were investigating all possibilities. The F.L.N., thought to number about 100 hard-core members, claimed responsibility for about 400 bomb attacks in France last year, most of them in Corsica. But it said it was suspending attacks during the election so as not to drive voters to the Right. In the election, opinion polls appearing yesterday showed the Socialist candidate, Francois Mitterrand, moving into a strong position to defeat the President.. _ According to one poll published in the independent newspaper, “Le Quotidien de Paris,” Mr Mitterrand, who

is 64 and is fighting in his third presidential race, would win with an 8 per cent margin in a straight contest with Mr Giscard. Another in the weekly “Paris-Match” said the President would defeat the Socialist leader by only 1 per cent in a second-round runoff after eight other candidates were eliminated in the first round tomorrow week. Results of the polls, taken in the second week of April, were among the last that can be published under French electoral law and probably will be taken as a guide by

millions -of uncommitted voters on how to use their ballot.

Mr Giscard's supporters probably will dismiss as a mirage the apparent swing away from him shown by the polls, which some French policitians allege were being manipulated. A new blow to the President’s hopes was struck by a report from the Ministry of Labour which showed that unemployment, a key issue in the campaign, rose again • in March and now stood at about 7 per cent. The latest polls confirmed also that Mr Giscard’s main rival on the Right of the political spectrum, Jacques Chirac — Mayor of Paris and once his Prime Minister — was continuing to make inroads in the President’s support. - . Mr Chirac, who filled Paris’s main sports stadium last week-end with nearly 50,000 enthusiastic supporters drawn from a broad crosssection of French society now would take 18.5 per cent of the vote in the first round the “Paris-Match” poll said. According to “ParisMatch,” the Communist,. George Marchais, who appears to be ready to tell his party faithful to vote for Mr Mitterrand in the final ballot on May 10, has moved ahead slightly to hold 19 per cent support in mid-month.