CAPTURE BY BANDITS

Evening Post, Volume CXX, Issue 87, 9 October 1935, Page 12

CAPTURE BY BANDITS

STORY OF GARETH •■ JON£S

DISPATCHED BY DR. MUELLER

, The tragic story of the last days of Mr. Gareth Jones, the former secretary of Mr. Lloyd George, who was,kidnapped by Chinese bandits and found .murdered on August 11, is revealed in. a dispatch from Kalgan1 sent to Germany by Dr. Mueller,, the journalist, who was his companion in plight but was released. . . . - . ■

The dispatch has been- issued by the German Official News Agency, of which Dr. Mueller is the Peking representative. ■:'■■■■■ ,

At Dolo Nor. the travellers were requested by Japanese authorities to take not the great motor road, which was said to be so bad as to have ruined many cars, but the road over the grassland, which had the advantage of being "quite free of danger from bandits." "We approached' the village called 'The Great Tool House of the family Ho.' Mr. Jones noticed a man in Chinese uniform, which did not astonish us, as we expected to see members of the gendarmerie; . ,

"But as we drove out gendarmerie began to shoot at us. From behind walls and' on the houses they suddenly appeared, and shot at us like wild men, these people in the blue kepis,of the gendarmerie. ■ "I jumped from the car land ran towards where the shots were coming from.

"Bullets flew past my head, and two struck the car. After between 30 and 40 shots the firing stopped. Several men came towards us, apparently embarrassed.

"It was all a mistake, they explained. They were gendarmerie sent to protect the roads from bandits and Japanese, and they had mistaken our car for a Japanese one.. . . v

"My servant brought my luggage, and V was asked to open it for a purely formal examination before we went on. But when our boxes were opened and a few silver dollars were seen the men would not. keep up the sham any longer. . They grabbed the dollars and put them in their pockets.

"I jumped up and asked what sort of manners these were? Then came calmly, almost modestly, the graphic answer: 'Oh, we are not gendarmes at all, we are only bandits.' ■ ' •

"Then Jones was brought and {the atmosphere became much more unfriendly. "•.'-'■

"Meanwhile bandits were dictating to my servant the list of money and munitions required as ransom for us."

Mr. Gareth , Jones then told Dr. Mueller his experiences. He had been taken into a room. The end of the rope with which he was tied was drawn over his head and pulled up to the balcony in the roof.

"Somebody went behind him with.a rope knotted in a loop, and he had good reason to believe that there and; then his death was being "prepared. ■ i

"With fully justified pride," adds Dr. Mueller, "Mr. Jones reiterated to me that he was not afraid and had not felt the slightest degree weak, and that he had only been full of purely objective interest in what was going on. around him."