ENGLISHMEN HELD IN YUGOSLAVIA

Wanganui Chronicle, 1 December 1948, Page 5

ENGLISHMEN HELD IN YUGOSLAVIA

PASSENGERS AND CREW OF A MISSING PLANE LONDON, Noy 30 (Recd 6 pm).— The British ambassador at Belgrade (Sir Charles Peake) has asked the Yugoslav Foreign Office about the fate of four Englishmen who were passengers and the crew of a priv-ately-owned British plane which disappeared on a flight from Britain to Australia after taking off from Croydon on Octber 29. The “Daily Mail’s” Belgrade correspondent says that the four men are reprted to be alive and well in Yugoslavia. The correspondent says the Zionists seized the plane for use in Palestine and are said to be holding the men for ransom. The occupants of the plane, which was a 10-seater Lodestar, were two engineers of the Domset Construction Engineering Company of Richmond, Surrey. Mr R. E. Morris, and an ex-Battle-of-Britain Pilot, Squadron-Leader Wellmon. The pilot was Captain Thornton Hall, with Mr. J. Ash, as navigator. The passengers were being flown to New South Wales to start a new 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 of an advertisement inserted bv the owners of the plane, R. A. Brand and Company, the company received a telephone call from Berne to sav 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 the Milan underworld as a “super spiv,” and. if necessary, nay the £1250 ransom demanded. However, following the abandonment of conditions of secrecy which i his man laid down he has disappeared. Brand and company are now pinning all their hopes on the Foreign Office and the secret service to get the plane and mon back.