Red Army men attack agency

Press, 8 November 1978, Page 8

Red Army men attack agency

I NZPA Frankfurt .!] About 15 masked mer d armed with clubs attacked iljthe Frankfurt bureau ol e *West Germany’s national jnews agency yesterday but j the police, alerted by an e alarm, burst in and captured t (eight. The others fled. "They were trying to i force us to put out a statement on behalf of some Red Army Faction in jail,” said f Mr Klaus Bosse, local - bureau chief of Deutsche I Presse Agentur. The Red Army Faction is a band of terrorists that has i committed scores of kidnap- ’ pings, murders, and assaults i in West Germany in recent years. ' The raiders entered the D.P.A. office, bound and gagged the bureau’s telephone II operator. sawed through the lines, and then stormed into the newsroom (where five employees were j working. _ The editor (Mr Herbert 11 Schulze-Andree) pressed a . button sounding an alarm in . a police precinct around the [ corner, and wrote a brief item on his electronic editing machine and sent it out j over D.P.A.’s news wires. I Bureau employees said ■ that within minutes, a

■t I strong force of armed police dashed in and one of the inn vaders shouted, “The pigs d are here.” The police over>f; powered eight of the raiders d but the other managed to it escape. No-one was injured. n A D.P.A. spokesman said d the attackers had a two-page statement they sought to 0 j force D.P.A. to distribute to ..jits newspaper, radio, and d television clients. It claimed j! that two jailed terrorists pwere being mistreated. e ! He said the terrorists named were Karl-Heinz DelIwo, convicted of taking part jin a 1975 assault on the . I West German Embassy m Stockholm in which two > hostages were murdered, and Werner Hoppe, convicted of attempted murder in a e gunfight with the police. - According to the spokes- “ man. the statement claimed - authorities had imposed a i news blockade on reports i about Hoppe and Dellwo. It -' said Dellwo was on a hunger strike to protest t prison conditions and Hoppe i j was being subjected to isolai j tion terror. The raiders called themf selves Michael Knoll-Willy • 'Peter Stoll commandos. : Knoll and Stoll were German terrorists killed this I j year in a shoot-out wffh i police.