London Protests

Press, Volume CVIII, Issue 31656, 17 April 1968, Page 11

London Protests

(N.Z.P A.-Reuter—Copyright)

LONDON, April 16. Demonstrators yelling “Avenge Rudi Dutschke!” tried to invade the London office of West Germany’s Axel Springer Publishing Group yesterday. Police trying to quieten the 600 demonstrators arrested 17 men and a woman. There had been an earlier demonstration at the West German Embassy by a crowd of more than 1000 proclaiming their support for West Germany’s student rioters

and their leader, Rudi Dutschke, who was shot and wounded by a would-be assassin last week. Both London demonstrations were offshoots of the larger, more peaceful Aldermaston March, revived after an interval of five years.

At the West German Embassy, the crowd burned a swastika, tossed a smoke bomb and tried unsuccessfully to push past police lines By contrast, the Aldermaston March itself went off quietly. About 22,000 people assembled in Trafalgar Square after a 40-mile trek from the Aldermaston nuclear weapons centre. Whereas previous marches were devoted to opposing the hydrogen bomb, today’s event turned into a multi-purpose crusade embracing the Vietnam war, the killing of Dr Martin Luther King, and a hotch-potch of Left-wing and anarchist causes.