“Plan To Kidnap Pope”

Press, Volume CVIII, Issue 31736, 20 July 1968, Page 13

“Plan To Kidnap Pope”

(N.Z.P.A.-Reuter—Copyright) LONDON, July 19. A prosecution witness claiming connections with the United States’ secret service denied a defence suggestion at an attempted murder trial in the Old Bailey yesterday that he planned to kidnap the Pope and hold him to ransom.

Alan Bruce Cooper, who said he had worked for the United States secret service for two years, was giving evidence in a case against four men charged with planning to murder a man in the Old Bailey courtroom itself by a cyanide-loaded needle fired from an attache case.

Among the accused are the twin brothers, Ronald and Reginald Kray, well known in the Soho nightclub district. The attache case, the prosecution said, contained a

system of springs to shoot a cyanide-loaded needle into the intended victim’s body as he sat in the dock of the Old Bailey courtroom.

The victim was described as George Caranua, a Greek, who, at the time of the plot, was on bail to appear at an Old Bailey trial. He was to be murdered, the prosecution alleged, over a dispute involving ownership of some Soho nightclubs. The prosecution said the Kray brothers had decided it would be easiest to get their

man where he might feel safest in the dock of the Old Bailey. But the plan failed, the prosecution said, when the man hired to do the killing (for £1000) lost his nerve in the crowded courtroom. Mr Cooper, who said he had become a police informer to “save his own skin,” was closely cross-examined by a defence counsel after admitting that he had set up the murder plan. But Mr Cooper denied any plan to kidnap the Pope. He agreed, however, that he had once been approached by the Kray brothers to raise a private army to rescue the former Congo Prime Minister, Moishe Tshombe, when he was imprisoned in Algeria. Mr Cooper also denied defence suggestions that he planned to raise a private army to assassinate the President of Malawi, Dr Hastings Banda, or that while on a visit to the United States he had tried to contact the Mafia. Pressed about his claimed secret service links. Mr Cooper said that defence counsel could check his credentials with the service’s European director. Mr Cooper said conversations about the planned killing had included the possible use of a crossbow with telescopic sights—produced as an exhibit in court—or dynamite. But the Kray brothers decided on the attache case needle-gun after a demonstration in a London hotel room.