LONDON SIEGE Police offer meal deal to gunmen

Press, Volume CXV, Issue 34021, 10 December 1975, Page 21

LONDON SIEGE Police offer meal deal to gunmen

(N.Z.P. A.-Reuter —Copyright) LONDON, December 9. The Irish Republican Army gunmen holding hostage a middle-aged married couple in a Central London flat are now faced with the choice of starving or releasing one of their two captives in return for food and cigarettes.

The police have said that they will supply the !guerrillas with food if they promise to release Mrs Sheila Matthews, aged 53, one hour after jreceiving their first meal.

The offer was made over a specially-installed closed telephone link between the gunmen — who have been trapped in the tiny livingroom of a first-floor flat near Marylebone Station since Saturday night, after a gang-land-style car chase and gun battle — and the police occupying the ground floor of the block of flats. Some hours after the food offer, the gunmen had still not communicated their decision.

The guerrillas, who have been linked by forensic evidence to a number of shootings in the West End of London, have demanded an escape aircraft to take them to Ireland, but the police have refused to make any such deal.

Wanted man doubt

The possibility that Michael Wilson, the most-i wanted man in Britain, is I not involved in the siege has now entered the police squad’s calculations. The Deputy Assistant Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police (Commander Ernest Bond) said today that three gunmen had identified themselves by Christian names — which the police say are not necessarily genuine — during hot-line talks with police negotiators.

Commander Bond said that the besieged gunmen had asked for food and cigarettes for five persons, thereby indicating that there were only three guerrillas and two hostages in the flat. The possibility remains, however, that all four are inside the Matthews’s flat,

and that only three have spoken on the direct line to the police. Commander Bond said that there was still speculation that Michael Wilson, who is wanted especially in connection with the recent doorstep assassination of Mr Ross McWhirter, was among the men in the flat.