HUNT FOR BRITONS HELD CAPTIVE IN YUGOSLAVIA

Gisborne Herald, Volume LXXV, Issue 22808, 1 December 1948, Page 7

HUNT FOR BRITONS HELD CAPTIVE IN YUGOSLAVIA

(9 a.m.)

LONDON, Nov. 30,

The British Ambassador in Belgrade, Sir Charles Peake, has asked the Yugoslav Foreign Office about the fate of four Englishmen who were passengers and crew of a privately-owned British plane which disappeared on a fight from Britain to Australia after taking off from Croydon on October 29. The Daily Mail’s correspondent in Belgrade says the four men are reported to be alive and well in Yugoslavia. The correspondent says that Zionists seized the plane lor use in Palestine and are said to be holding the men for ransom.

The occupants of the plane, which is a 10-seater Lodestar, were two engineers of the Dowsett Construction and

Engineering Company of Richmond, Surrey, Mr. R. E. Morris and a Battle of Britain pilot, Squadron Leader Wcllmon.

The pilot was Captain Thornton Hall with Mr. J. Ash as navigatoi-.

The passengers were being flown to New South Wales to start a surface mining venture. Five others were to have joined the plane at Rome, but it never got there The Foreign Office received reports that the plane had crashed at Ljubljana, Yugoslavia.

Following the appearance in Italian, French and Swiss newspapers ot' an advertisement inserted by the owners of the plane, R. A. Brand and Company, the company received a telephone call from Berne to say that they could not have the plane back and that the firm’s employees were prisoners.

Mr. Geoffrey Welch, an executive of R. A. Brand and Company, has flown to Milan in an effort to contact the originator of the telephone call who is known in Milan underworld as a super “spiv” and, if necessary, pay the £1250 ransom demanded.

However, following the abandonment of the conditions of secrecy which this man laid down, lie has disappeared Brand and Company are now pinning all Iheic hopes on the Foreign Office and the Secret Service to get the plane and the men back.