SOLIAH'S PARENTS SHUN SPOTLIGHT OF SLA ARREST; COUPLE SAYS DAUGHTER INNOCENT.

Byline: Bhavna Mistry and Charles F. Bostwick Staff Writer

Trying their best to remain calm following the arrest of their fugitive daughter, Martin Soliah said that he and his wife have been taking daily walks in the desert, working in the garden and doing calesthenics.

After hiring their own attorney, the parents of Kathleen Soliah said their daughter's imprisonment is troubling but they have their own problems that they need to deal with - without elaborating.

``We take one-hour hikes in the desert daily,'' said Martin Soliah, 81, standing at the front door of their Palmdale home. ``I do my calesthenics and she works in the garden. We're just trying to stay busy and keep ourselves occupied.''

The spotlight turned on Soliah, a retired Palmdale High School teacher and coach, and his wife two weeks ago when FBI officials announced the arrest of Kathleen Soliah, living under an assumed named in Minnesota and wanted on a 23-year-old warrant for two attempted bombings of Los Angeles police cars in 1975.

The elder Soliahs have talked little with the media since the arrest, but have stressed their belief in the innocence of their daughter - with whom they said they have had sporadic contact since she went underground in September 1975.

The FBI and Los Angles Police Department said the 52-year-old mother of three, active in community theater and local politics in Minnesota, was part of the Symbionese Liberation Army, the radical group that kidnapped heiress Patricia Hearst in 1973. Most of the SLA's members died in a fiery 1974 shootout with the LAPD.

Martin Soliah said he has not been in contact with his daughter or her family since her incarceration June 16 and said he has learned no further details about his daughter's arrest or charges against her.

He said he and has wife aren't planning to tell their stories on television.

``They give me letters, I never open them,'' said Martin Soliah. ``We'd never accept anything anyway.''

Kathleen Soliah is being held by Minnesota authorities and is scheduled for a July 15 extradition hearing to decide whether she will be sent to California for trial.

``They would drop the charges if they had any sense,'' said Martin Soliah. ``They told me they had nothing to hold her on.''

The Soliahs said that their daughter, a 1965 Palmdale High School graduate who moved to Berkeley after graduating from the University of California, Santa Barbara, was never a member of the SLA.

Her mother told the Daily News after Kathleen's arrest that her daughter only helped to hide the SLA's three surviving members - Hearst and William and Emily Harris - after the L.A. shootout, when the three were convinced the FBI and police intended to gun them down too.

Kathleen Soliah had been friends with one of the slain SLA members, Angela Atwood, whom she had met in the cast of a play and worked with at a restaurant. Kathleen Soliah was one of the main speakers in a Berkeley park at a memorial service for the slain SLA members, and the surviving SLA members went to her for help, her parents say.

But Hearst - who joined the SLA after it kidnapped her at age 19 from her Berkeley apartment - told a different story.

In the book she wrote after President Jimmy Carter pardoned her for her bank robbery conviction, she wrote that Kathleen Soliah was one of four masked robbers who held up a bank in a Sacramento suburb in April 1975.

A bank customer was killed by a shotgun blast, which Hearst said was fired by Emily Harris.

Hearst said Stephen Soliah, Kathleen's brother, was a getaway driver, and Mike Bortin, who is now married to a second Soliah daughter, Josephine, was another gunman. At the time of the robbery, Bortin had been paroled from jail after a conviction on an explosives charge.

Only Stephen Soliah, arrested with Hearst and the Harrises in September 1975 in San Francisco,` was tried for the bank robbery. He was acquitted.

Hearst said Stephen Soliah waited outside during the robbery but prosecutors presented witnesses who said they saw him inside the bank. The jury acquitted Stephen Soliah after the defense brought in a bank customer who looked remarkably like him and testified that he had come into the bank during the robbery, saw what was going on and walked out.

In August 1975, Hearst wrote, Kathleen Soliah, William Harris and Jim Kilgore - who remains a fugitive - drove from the Bay Area to Los Angeles with two pipe bombs. One they attached under a parked police car in East Los Angeles, and the second to another parked police car elsewhere in the city, Hearst wrote.

The first fell off without exploding, prompting a police search that found the second, Hearst wrote.

Martin Soliah said Kathleen was in Guatemala when the bomb was planted.

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PHOTO (Ran in Valley Edition only) SOLIAH