BRITISH OFFICER’S DARING WAR EXPLOITS RECALLED BY NEW EPISODE

Evening Star, Issue 26136, 25 June 1947, Page 5

BRITISH OFFICER’S DARING WAR EXPLOITS RECALLED BY NEW EPISODE

IN.Z.P.A. Special Correspondent..) LONDON, June 24. A dispatch to the European edition of the New York ‘ Herald-Tribune ’ says that the 17-year-old Jewish youth, Alexander Rub.owitz, whose disappearance led to the arrest of Major Roy Alexander Farran a few days ago, is believed to have been tortured and murdered and the body given to a 'Bedouin for disposal. Major Farran, who is aged only 26,. has one of the outstanding records of the war. He holds the Distinguished Service Order, the -Military Cross with two bars, and the French Croix de Guerre and Legion of Merit. After six years of war service, during which he was the hero of a muh"ber of daring expeditions behind the enemy lines, Farran-joined the Palestine Military Police with the rank of assistant superintendent. Another report from Jerusalem claims that Farran was responsible for organising a number of police arid military officers into a secret organisation to fight the terrorists, and that discovery of this organisation led to reports of a purge in Palestine. Farran, who enlisted when he was 19, earned a reputation during the war for reckless courage and for treading on the toes of senior officers. One of his fellow officers said he had never met a . man who inspired such devotion in ' the troops serving under him, “ In anoth-r life he would have been a pirate or Robin Hood,” he said. • “ I know hundreds of men in Britain to-day, all of them civilians, who would rise in a body to go to his help.” Farran, who escaped from police custody in the .Jerusalem Allenby barracks after being extradited from Syria, has twice before escaped from captivity. He wriggled out of the Nazi clutches iii Greece and escaped from a. prisoner-of-war camp when recaptured. Palestine police headquarters refuse to confirm or deny reports that he was helped to freedom by members of his own unit Oil guard in the Allenby barracks.