Hostages’ agony goes on in crisis deadlock

Press, 31 May 1977, Page 1

Hostages’ agony goes on in crisis deadlock

NZPA-Reuter Glimmen The ordeal of 60 hostages held by two groups of South Moluccan gunmen entered its second week yesterday with no sign of a breakthrough. An estimated 55 passengers, among them a pregnant woman, who boarded a breakfast-time train to Groningen on Monday, May 23, are still inside their prison on wheels. In The Hague, a Justice Ministry spokesman said that telephone contacts with the train hijackers and a four-man team of gunmen holding four teachers in the village school at Bovensmilde were difficult and awkward. “The gunmen sometimes will not answer the phone, and when they do they are alternately aggressive and cool, with no trace of good humour,” the spokesman said. The Justice Ministry said that a 23-year-old female medical student, whose name has not been released, was playing a key role op the train in treating the hostages. The hijackers have allowed her to talk by telephone to the Government

crisis centre in nearby Assen—but only about the medical condition of the patients. The gunmen have repeatedly rejected appeals by the Government to free the pregnant woman, Mrs N. Ellenbroek-Prinsen, aged 23, who is expecting

her baby in two months. She suffers from a thyroid complaint. They have also rejected an appeal by a group of their countrywomen to free the woman. It has also been confirmed that the gunmen have rejected a Govern-

ment request to specify which country they want to fly to in the jumbo jet they have demanded. Authorities in Bovensmilde, where 105 children were released early on Friday, have ringed the village school with barbed wire, after obtaining the agreement of the gunmen. The aim of this step was to stop people wandering too near the building. The two groups of hijackers have apparently had no contact with each other for several days. A field telephone link installed to let them communcate is no longer working.