World Notes: Terrorism a Deadly Connection

The high-ranking French Defense Ministry official, Rene Audran, 56, had just driven from his office in Paris to his home in the western suburb of Celle- Saint-Cloud late last week. As he pulled up in front of his house, he was ambushed by assassins who pumped six shots into his body before he could escape from his gray Renault. Audran, who headed the ministry department that deals with international arms sales, died instantly.

Within an hour, an anonymous caller telephoned Agence France-Presse in Paris and claimed that the killing had been carried out by Action Directe, a shadowy French terrorist group that has been linked to West Germany's Red Army Faction. Only hours before Audran's killing, three 230-ft. electric-power pylons at a nuclear-power plant near Hamburg were damaged by explosives. Also last week a suspected Red Army Faction member, Johannes Thimme, 28, became the first casualty of the new terror campaign: he was killed when a bomb he was carrying in a baby carriage detonated prematurely in Stuttgart.