Leftists blamed for U.S. officer’s death

Press, 28 May 1983, Page 8

Leftists blamed for U.S. officer’s death

NZPA Sari Salvador The United States Ambassador to El Salvador has suggested that Leftist guerrillas had killed an American military adviser on Thursday and said the murder would not affect his country’s support for the Salvadorean Government.

Deane Hinton said that evidence was sketchy on the shooting of LieutenantCommander Albert Schaufelberger, the deputy head of the United States training mission, but the type of violence used had been that “properly ascribed to bv the Left.” Salvadorean investigators said that Commander Schaufelberger had been shot repeatedly in the head with explosive bullets. He was the first American officer to die in the country’s civil war. A local radio station

broadcast a statement slipped under its door that said the oldest and most hardline guerrilla group, the Popular Liberation Forces, took responsibility for the killing in response to ‘Yankee intervention and imperialism." Guerrillas usually occupv a radio station and broadcast a pre-recorded tape when they have a communique to deliver. The guerrillas’ own stations did not carry the statement. Commander Schaufelberger, who was 33, was shot three times in the head by two men as he sat in his car outside the University of Central America on the outskirts of San Salvador.

He had been waiting for his girlfriend, whom he regularly fetched from the university where she worked.

Meanwhile, the “New

York Times” reports that the Honduran Government has agreed to let the Reagan Administration treble its military advisers in Honduras and open a training base there for Salvadorean soldiers.

The “Times” quoted a senior Pentagon official, but a Defence Department spokesman told Reuters that he had no comment to make.

The newspaper said that the training plan ran against the grain of a policy statement adopted earlier this year by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee which said that any future United States training of Salvadorean soldiers should be done in the United States.

Most of the training has been done in El Salvador, and some on United States bases in Panama.