Man Blown Up In Red Square Blast

Press, Volume CVII, Issue 31409, 30 June 1967, Page 11

Man Blown Up In Red Square Blast

(N.Z. Press Association —Copyright) MOSCOW, June 29. An unidentified elderly man haranguing a small crowd near Lenin’s Tomb in Red Square today was suddenly blown to bits by a crude home-made grenade in his coat pocket.

Witnesses said the man, apparently in his eighties, was shabbily dressed and seemed to have come to Moscow from the country. They said he approached Lenin’s granite Mausoleum and began shouting at passers-by about the situation in the Middle East. All that could oe understood was that he opposed the cease-fire. Suddenly he exploded. Police said he might have intended to hurl the grenade at the Kremlin wall. It was not known whether the man purposely detonated the explosive to kill himself. Two by-standers were slightly wounded by the explosion.

One of the police on duty said the eternal flame lit last May 8 at the new tomb of a Second World War Unknown Soldier had exploded, the Associated Press reported. The tomb is just around a corner of the Kremlin from Red Square and about 250 yards from Lenin’s Tomb. Red Square was closed off by police after the explosion.

Observers recalled that when a man burned himself to death in a Moscow square two years ago, an explanation from Communist sources said he was protesting at not being allowed to go to fight against the United States in Vietnam. Later reports after that incident Indicated the man was a religious fanatic who immolated himself on a day specially marked by his sect for self-inflicted suffering. A police spokesman at the station controlling Red Square denied last night that anything unusual had happened. A Foreign Ministry press department spokesman asked about the blast said: “We know nothing.” Western reporters who questioned people on the square later this evening were surrounded by hostile crowds. One woman told them: “You are guests here. You should behave yourselves.” A policeman took one photographer away for questioning, but he was released after his credentials were checked.