Doctor aids gunmen with sick hostage

Press, Volume CXV, Issue 33963, 2 October 1975, Page 15

Doctor aids gunmen with sick hostage

(New Zealand Press Association—Copyright)

LONDON, October 1.

A doctor helped the three black gunmen in the Knightsbridge Spaghetti House siege to make a do-it-yourself medical check on one of their hostages, who was sick, early today, but they refused to release him, and the siege moved into its fourth day with no solution in sight.

The doctor put questions to the gunmen through the steel door of the restaurant’s basement storeroom, where they have been holed up with their six Italian hostages since the early hours of Sunday.

After the check-up, Commander Christopher Payne said: “The man has vomited twice, and is perspiring, but I am satisfied that he is not seriously ill.”

Last night, the Italian Con-sul-General in London (Dr Mario Manca) offered to take the place of the sick hostage, but the Metropolitan Police Commissioner (Sir Robert Mark) refused permission "to avoid placing yet another hostage at risk.” The three gunmen are led by a Nigerian named by the police as Franklyn Peter Davis. The other two are only known by their Christian names, Wesley and Bonzo. They took their hostages, all members of the Italian staff of the Spaghetti House, after their plan to rob the restaurant had been foiled by the quick arrival of the police, who, with dogs and marksmen, have sealed off the restaurant, the conditions inside which have been steadily deteriorating.

The gunmen, now said to be tired and confused, have demanded an aircraft to take them out of the country, but the police insist that there will be no deals.

Earlier last night, the Black Liberation Front had said that the only way to avoid violence at the restaurant was to give in to the gunmen’s demands for an aircraft. “They will either come out in an aeroplane of in a coffin,” it said. The 8.L.F., which was not involved in the robbery at-

tempt or siege, and condemns violence, said that al) three men had helped the B.L.F. m their “educational and welfare projects” during the last few years. One of its representatives was allowed to speak to the gunmen on Monday. Sir Robert said that initially the gunmen had made threats, but that in the last 36 hours these had subsided. “Their conversation has occasionally been rational, and occasionally irrational, and this is making it exceedingly difficult to evaluate the threats,” he said. “We have told them repeatedly that they have not killed anybody, they have not harmed any-

body, nobody has been hurt, and we are trying to persuade them that their emergence without violence would be the best thing for everyone.”