Cable briefs

Press, 6 May 1983, Page 6

Cable briefs

Spying charges

Five French citizens have been charged with spying for the Soviet Union in cases connected with Soviet personnel expelled from Paris last month, reports a radio station. The five had been charged with providing secrets, mainly in the industrial field, to Soviet contacts based in France. — Paris.

Bodies in drums A man and two women whose bodies were stuffed into a pair of steel drums found in Golden Gate Park may have been the victims of revenge or a crimerelated killing, the police have speculated. Forensic experts prised the tops off the drums to discover the corpses — the fully-clothed body of a black man in one drum, and the nude bodies of two white women in the other. — San Francisco. Low key The Polish authorities are playing down street clashes this week which shattered the country’s surface calm, and are showing no sign of altering a general trend towards tighter Communist Party control. Official newspapers today hardly mentioned a march by 8000 people after a Mass at Warsaw Cathedral, which began spontaneously and was allowed to develop under the eyes of hundreds of police before eventually being broken up. — Warsaw.

Mother’s lament David. Serrano, aged 15, has died — fours days after he became the fifth brother in his family to be shot in Brooklyn, New York. Three of the Serrano brothers were killed in 1977, one survived two woundings that year, and now the fifth has died. “It’s the neighbourhood,” said Mary Serrano, who has raised 14 children in Brooklyn. “The

gangs control everything. And there’s pressure on the kids to join. They should stop the guns and drugs you can get all over this neighbourhood.,” — New York.

Workers ‘safe’ Ten foreign relief workers abducted by rebels in Ethiopa two weeks ago are safe and moving towards the Sudanese border by mule, reports the Irish aid agency, Concern. The muleback trip across hundreds of kilometres of rugged terrain could take at least three weeks. 3- Dublin. Liner suicide A British woman musician on board the cruise liner Oriana has committed suicide by jumping off the ship as it sailed to Fiji from Vanuatu. Jan Boucher, aged 45, jumped off the liner just before she was to appear in a show about 10 hours before the liner docked at Lautoka, the ship’s first port of call in Fiji.—Suva.