DRUG RING TOOK OVER U.S.-BUILT AIRSTRIP, HONDURAS OFFICIALS SAY

TEGUCIGALPA, Honduras - Honduran officials said Monday drug traffickers had
taken over an airstrip built by the United States in the 1980s to support
Nicaraguan Contra rebels.

The disclosure came as police said a senior anti-drug official had escaped
an assassination attempt. The target had handed a list of suspected
traffickers and accomplices to the government just days before.

"We had information that the El Aguacate airstrip was being used, we sent
personnel to the zone (and) took soil samples, and we found cocaine
residue," Honduras' chief anti-drug official, Fidel Borjas, told reporters.

"This confirms to us that it is being used or was being used as a transit
point for drugs," Borjas said.

In the 1980s the United States trained and armed the Contra rebel army to
fight the Sandinista government in Nicaragua, which was backed by the
Soviet Union and Cuba.

The Contras enjoyed a safe haven in Honduras, just across the border from
Nicaragua.

El Aguacate, about 80 miles east of Tegucigalpa, today belongs to the
Honduran army, which pledged to investigate earlier reports of drug
trafficking at the base but has yet to publish a report.

A U.S. Embassy spokesman declined to comment.

In another development, unidentified men in a car shot up the front of the
house of Carlos Sosa, president of the Central American Commission in the
Fight Against Drug Trafficking, early Sunday, police spokeswoman Liliana
Santos said Monday.

"Neither he nor anyone in his family was hurt," Santos said.

Sosa said Thursday he had drawn up a list of people in Honduras connected
with narcotics and money-laundering and had handed it to the
Attorney-General's Office.

In a radio interview, an unfazed Sosa said the assailants' gunfire
destroyed a car parked in front of his house in the affluent district of La
Florencia.

"I don't know if this was so much an attack against me because in a way it
seems more of an attack against my property," he said. "That's why I don't
want to give it too much importance and have not reported it to the
authorities."

Honduras, like other Central American countries, is a key transit point for
cocaine being taken from Colombia to the United States. Honduras has seized
3,771 pounds of cocaine so far this year.

Asked if he thought the attack was related to his work against the drug
trade or the list he prepared for prosecutors, Sosa said he preferred not
to comment.

"I consider this a professional hazard," he said. "Like working with dogs
- -- vets can be bitten. Equally, if you work in this field, you're never
short of enemies."