Attempt on Barbie’s life

Press, 21 May 1987, Page 10

Attempt on Barbie’s life

By

CLAIRE ROSEMBERG

Reuters NZPA Lyon, France Police have detained a gunman on a mission to assassinate Klaus Barbie, as victims of wartime Nazi persecution prepared to testify at his trial for crimes against humanity. Police said the gunman slipped into the Saint Joseph jail, in Lyon, disguised as a doctor in a bid to kill the former Gestapo officer who is boycotting the trial, saying that he was kidnapped in Bolivia.

Four witnesses for the prosecution are due to take the witness stand today to recount horrors of the four-year German occupation of France. About 90. others, most of them elderly, are due to give evidence by June 15. The testimony of victims of Nazism is expected to give a poignant, emotional charge to the trial, which since the middle of last week has taken place with the defendant absent from the dock.

Barbie, aged 73, dubbed “The Butcher of Lyon,”

walked out of the trial last Wednesday, the third day of the hearings, saying he had been kidnapped from Bolivia four years ago and was being held illegally in France. The police said they arrested a 43-year-old man, carrying an antiquated revolver loaded with lead bullets and gunpowder, who got into the jail by showing the guards medical orders issued by a Paris hospital in 1984 for a consultation with the prisoner. The court will this week examine a roundup of 86

Jews on February 9, 1943, at the Lyon offices of the French Jewish Union, 84 of whom were deported to Nazi death camps. Their arrest is one of several acts for which Barbie, a senior Gestapo officer in the south-east-ern city from 1942 to 1944, faces life imprisonment if convicted of crimes against humanity. Among evidence presented by the State prosecution is a telex despatched three days later from the Lyon Gestapo to its Paris headquarters recounting the

circumstances of the raid. “At the time of the arrest, more than 30 Jews were already in the offices,” the document said. “They were arrested immediately. Within the hour more Jews arrived and a total 86 people were thus detained.” “Most of these Jews intended to flee soon to take refuge in Switzerland. During the search a considerable quantity of valuable objects, foreign currency, etc were found,” it added.