After Anti-Newspaper Riot

Press, Volume CVIII, Issue 31657, 18 April 1968, Page 9

After Anti-Newspaper Riot

(N.Z.P.A.’Reuter—Copyright) BONN, April 17. West Germany’s Cabinet was to meet today for urgent consideration of five days of student riots after the attempted assassination of Mr Rudi Dutschke. Later, Parliament's internal affairs committee will decide whether to call a special Bundestag session on the violent battles between police and Left-wing students which spread from West Berlin to half a dozen German cities. Latest estimates put the number of those detained during the clashes at 1000. About

100 police and many more students were believed to have been injured. Early today leaders of the Socialist German Students’ League, political driving force behind the demonstrations, discussed whether to take new action against the giant Axel Springer newspaper chain. The league claims the Springer group was responsible for whipping up an intolerant political climate that led to Thursday’s shooting of Dutschke. In Frankfurt, Hamburg, Cologne, Esslingen, and other cities, student demonstrations outside Springer newspaper buildings erupted into brutal battles as police cleared a way for newspaper delivery vans.

Mr Dutschke, wounded by three revolver bullets in the attack near the league’s headquarters in West Berlin, is now reported recovering steadily in hospital from a brain injury. Yesterday, the first day of major violence since he was shot, a special meeting on the Social Democrat-Christian Democrat grand coalition heard a preliminary report of the riots. Informed sources said there

were differences of opinion about means to counter the unrest.

The meeting was attended by the Socialist Party leader, the Foreign Minister, Mr Willy Brandt, whose 19-year-old son, Peter, was among about 380 youths arrested in West Berlin over Easter weekend.

Disagreement appears to be mainly between the Socialist Justice Minister, Mr Gustav

Heinemann, and the Bavarian wing of Chancellor Kurt Georg Kiesinger’s Christian Democratic Party. Dr Heinemann has already said there should be careful examination of the arguments of the country’s rebellious youth. The Christian Democrat’s Bavarian wing is said to be urging even tougher police action against student demonstrators. In West Berlin justice authorities said the would-be assassin of Dutschke made a full confession in which he said he planned and carried out the attack single handed. Officials quoted Joseph Bachmann, a 23-year-old house-painter, as saying he had no-one to help him and had not been told by anyone to shoot Mr Dutschke. They said Bachmann told a prosecutor interrogating him at bis hospital bedside that he was not affiliated to any party. He was quoted as saying he

had the idea of killing Mr Dutschke on hearing about the assassination of the Negro leader, Dr Martin Luther King. The photograph shows West Berlin policemen walking through thousands of newspapers near the Springer publishing house, after demonstrators halted one delivery truck and' emptied it.