Gunmen surrender

Press, Volume CXV, Issue 33965, 4 October 1975, Page 15

Gunmen surrender

(N.Z. Press Assn —Copyright) LONDON, October 3. Three gunmen under siege for five days in the basement storeroom of a London restaurant released their six Italian hostages unharmed. The three gunmen surrendered. Their leader, a 28-year-old Nigerian former convict named Franklyn Davis, shot himself in the stomach after he let the hostages go, a police spokesman said. His condition was not immediately determined. The other two gunmen were young Jamaicans known only as Bonzo and Wesley. They invaded the Spaghetti House in the fashionable Knightsbridge district early last Sunday morning in a robbery attempt, but one of the nine Italian restaurateurs in the place at the time escaped and called the police.

A few hours before the siege ended, Scotland Yard announced that an Italian and a German had been arested and charged with con-

spiring in the attempted robbery. The first hint that the long ordeal was ending came shoitly after 4 a.m. when three ambulances backed up to the stucco-fronted restaurant, and attendants carried a pile of thick red blankets inside. A few minutes later the first of the Italians was helped out of the building, wrapped in a blanket. The other freed hostages followed in quick succession, some of them smiling and sprightly despite their five days and nights in the tiny basement storeroom.

Davis, released from prison last year after serving a sentence for a bank hold-up, told the deputy police commissioner, Mr Colin Woods, he and his two accomplices were coming out with their hands up. He then put a pistol tp his stomach and pulled the trigger. He was carried out on a stretcher and rushed to a hospital. His two companions handed over a pistol and a shotgun to the armed police in the corridor outside the steel-doored storeroom. A black community leader said that Weslev was 20-

year-old Wesley Dick, a black militant born in London of Jamaican parentage, and Bonzo was 22-year-old Tony Munro, believed to be the son of a wealthy West Indian family. More than 200 police, including a squad of marksmen equipped with rifles, pistols and tear gas, had surrounded the building off Hyde Park since before dawn Sunday. The Police Commissioner, Sir Robert Mark, said that the two Europeans charged in the attempted .robbery 'were Lillo Calogero Termine, aged 33, and Norbert Freidrich Waldberger, aged 48. He said that another man was sought. The other two Italians taken prisoner at the start of the siege were released on Sunday and Monday, one as a good-will gesture and the other because he became ill.

Mr Woods refused to say why the gunmen who, two days ago, vowed, “We’ll come out in an aeroplane or a coffin,” decided to give up. Scotland Yard repeatedly refused the gunmen’s demands for a plane to fly them to the West Indies.