I bared my chest and said ’kill me’ — hostage envoy

Press, 10 May 1980, Page 9

I bared my chest and said ’kill me’ — hostage envoy

NZPA London A hostage envoy, Dr Ali Afrouz has told how he offered to die in return for the release of the other captives of the London Iranian embassy siege. He said he bared his chest to a gunman and asked him to shoot him in exchange for freeing the others. Dr Afrouz, the charge d’affaires at the embassy, also gave details of a dramatic escape bid he made at the start of the Siege. He jumped out of a first floor window, but the terrorists hauled him back in, and kept him under armed guard for most of their six-day siege. Dr Afrouz, who was injured in the leap, and shot by a gunman as the Special Air Service men stormed in, was speaking from his bed at St Stephen Hospital, Chelsea, where he was “recovering and feeling much better.” He said: “As usual, I went to my office at about 8.50 a.m. I was doing some usual office work and I had some visitors, one of them a journalist. “Suddenly I heard some firing, shootings.

“I could not remember anything else until the next day, actually. I was unconscious. “I tried to escape. I tried to jump out of the window, and I fell down from the first floor.” H? Said he also had bullet wounds, and described how, when he was shot later in the siege, a bullet “went in one side of my leg and out of the other.” He said there were six gunmen, and he and some of his colleagues were the “key points” for the terrorists — apparently the main targets. “Most of the time they had me sitting in the room very close to them. They could have fired at me any time. Asked why he thought the terrorists picked on two hostages killed in the siege, ant not him, he said the gunmen twice asked him to go down and talk to the police. People in the room thought that Dr Afrouz would certainly be killed if he agreed to go downstairs — presumably because they thought it was a trap. He said that instead they asked another man to go with them.

He and a colleague, the press attache, Mr Abbas Lavasani, who was eventually shot, were “very tough” and he thought the gunmen realised this. “We never yielded ourselves to the terrorists.” Asked if he was frightened, he replied: “As a human, I think everybody has some kind of fear.” He knew that as the charge d’affaires, he was the main goal of the terrorists. He said he was worried about the 20 other people also being held captive. “I thought they would kill all of us, and 1 was feeling very responsible, not only for my life, but the other people. I asked them, if they wanted, to kill me, or keep me as long as they want. “I opened my chest to them and asked them ‘kill me,’ and let the other assistants go out. But they didn’t. “I was ready to die at any time to release everybody.” Asked how the gunmen treated them, he replied', “they threatened us every hour. It was killing us emotionally and physically, everyone of us, every hour.”