Moscow Alleges That Britain Persecuted Man Wanted By The Police

Wanganui Chronicle, 4 September 1950, Page 5

Moscow Alleges That Britain Persecuted Man Wanted By The Police

LONDON, Sept. 2 (Recd. 6pm).— The Moscow radio today alleged that Eugen Stefanowicz, wanted by Scotland Yard concerneng the murder on July 9 of a Buckinghamshire shopkeeper, had been "systematically persecuted" by the British police after , escaping from “an intelligence school ! which specially trains people to be sent to the Soviet and Poland.” | Stefanowicz left London in the Rusfslan freighter Seitroretsk and vanished from the ship before she reach'ed Stockholm. Passengers said he had been tran- | shipped to the deck of a Russian tugboat in the Baltic. The radio said that on July 10 Stefanowicz presented himself at the Soviet Embassy in London for repatriation. Accusations were later made by British papers “to the effect that while in Britain he was guilty of a criminal offence.” At a murder trial on August 17 the prosecutor alleged that Stefanowicz was clearly implicated in the murder of a shopkeeper. Another Pole, Zbigniew Kalinowski, was committed for trial on a charge of murder “with aother person.” A Scotland Yard Officer told the Court that Kalinowski told him: "I didn't kill the old | man. I went to the shop with stefanowicz. He killed him, but I did not I see him do it.” The radio said Stefanowicz, after serving with the Free Polish forces ir the Second World War, was sent to a British intelligence school. “Being unwilling, however, to be a tool of the British intelligence service, he escaped from the school, in which connection he began to be systematically persecuted by the British police.” British requests for Stefanowicz to be handed over were rejected as being “without foundation."