2
Wednesday, Aug. 19, 1987
Briefs
Rudolf Hess killed himself officials say
BERLIN — Rudolf Hess, the last surviving member of Adolf Hitler's inner circle, apparently strangled himself with a length of electrical cord after nearly half a century in prison, British officials said yesterday.
Hess died Monday in a British military hospital in West Berlin at the age of 93. He had been in prison since a bizarre "peace flight" to Britain in 1941 and, for 21 years, the sole inmate of the cavernous Spandau prison.
Eugene K. Bird, once the U.S. officer guarding Spandau, told The Associated Press that Hess, the former Nazi deputy fueherr, had tried to commit suicide on four other occasions.
Sri Lankan official unharmed in attack
COLOMBO, Sri Lanka — President Junus Jayawardene blamed Sinhala terrorists yesterday for a grenade attack in a parliament meeting room that killed one person and injured 14.
Jayawardene, who was unharmed, said on national radio that he was the target of the assassination attempt earlier in the day. He said terrorists angry with the agreement he signed with India last month to try to end the 4-year-old insurrection by Sri Lanka's Tamil minority were responsible.
The assailant fled in the panic that followed the explosions A group calling itself the Patriotic People's Movement claimed responsibility.
Union leaders quit miners' strike talks
JOHANNESBURG, South Africa — Talks aimed at reducing violence in the black miners' strike collapsed yesterday, and union leaders said they walked out after learning that 15 miners were injured by police during the negotiations.
Mine management blamed the breakdown on union recalcitrance.
From The Associated Press.
Tanker hit by gunfire from Iran
The Associated Press
MANAMA, Bahrain — Rocket-propelled grenades and machine gun fire hit a tanker yesterday at the southern edge of the Strait of Hormuz. Shipping sources called it the first known attack there in the seven years of the Persian Gulf War.
Also, Kuwait reported finding a floating mine in its coastal waters at the other end of the gulf, raising new problems for U.S. Navy officers preparing the next convoy of reflagged Kuwaiti tankers and Navy warships. Kuwait did not say when the mine was found.
There was no immediate explanation for the attack on the Osoc Sierra, a 20,578-ton chemical carrier registered in Liberia and operated by a Norwegian company. The shipping sources blamed Iranian commandos in speedboats, a tactic Iran has used often to attack ships inside the gulf.
Sources said damage to the tanker was minor and there were no casualties. They said the ship changed course to Fujairah, a United Arab Emirates port 30 miles south of Hormuz in the Gulf of Oman.
One source reported that Iranian naval units later stopped and searched a second vessel, the Splendor Cypriot, in the same general area, but no details were available. Iran often searches commercial vessels looking for cargo bound for Iraq, with which it has been at war since September 1980.
Lloyd's Shipping Intelligence Unit in London said the Osco Sierra left Singapore on Aug. 8 and was bound for Kuwait at the head of the gulf.
Lloyd's said the ship was attacked by two missiles. One missile hit the galley and the other missed.
The report, which said two gunboats were involved, apparently used the term "missiles" to describe the shoulder-fired rocket grenades.
Iran began regular attacks last September on ships owned by or serving Kuwait, which it accuses of transporting arms to Iraq.
Nation and World Officials seek reason of jet crash
Shooting incidents in or near Horzuz have been rare. Iran never has fired the Silkworm anti-ship missiles it placed along its bank of the strait, the entrance to the Persian Gulf.
BOMULUS, Mich. — Teams of federal investigators crisscrossed the scorched crash site of a Northwest Airlines jittered yesterday, as grieving families began the process of identifying the bodies of those killed.
The Associated Press
Relatives of passengers were warned by officials that some of the bodies might never be identified.
See related stories
"If . . . none of them (the dead) have an identifiable item on them, it's going to be impossible to identify," said Inspector Richard Stover of the Wayne County Sheriff's Department's emergency management department.
Officials disagreed about the number of fatalities.
Dr. Werner Spitz, the Wayne County medical examiner, said the death toll could be as high as 158; he estimated that 152 were aboard the
plane and five or six were killed on the ground.
Northwest officials said they believed 155 were aboard the plane and 154 were killed. Stover said he believed three people on the ground were killed.
Spitz said about half of the bodies had been positively identified and that hearses were being hired to come to the hangar Friday to pick them up.
A team of 100 investigators, including experts from the federal government and the companies that made the plane and engines, worked at the crash site for the second day, plotting the position of bodies and large pieces of wreckage.
John Lauber, one of five members of the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), refused to theorize about the cause of the crash, saying "we haven't ruled out anything at this point."
the type of plane that crashed, had been plagued with engine problems on at least three previous flights between November 1985 and last January that forced pilots to shut down an engine and turn back. Federal Aviation Administration records showed.
But in two of the incidents, involving turbine blade failures, the problem engines were replaced for repair. But in another incident, Sunda's crash, the records indicate:
NTSB investigators began backing away from the possibility that a catastrophic engine failure caused the crash.
The McDonnell-Douglas MD-80.
Lauber said that there was no physical evidence of an uncontained engine failure but that a less-severe engine problem had not been ruled out. An uncontained failure means that engine parts break free of the engine's outer skin and potentially damage critical parts of the plane, such as the control system.
The flaming plane skidded under three viaducts, two freeway overpasses and a train trestle Sunday night after taking off from Detroit Metropolitan Airport on a flight to Phoenix, Ariz. and suburban Los Angeles.
Northwest, based in the Minneapolis suburb of Eagan, Minn., flew in the last of the victims' relatives yesterday and housed them in airport hotels, where they gathered and talked to clergymen while awaiting 'identification of the bodies.'
A Northwest official, who declined to be identified, said the company had brought in about 300 victims' relatives from the United States and Canada.
The crash was the first of a major commercial plane in the United States in almost a year and the first involving a domestic carrier in almost two years.
Journalist credits self with escape
The Associated Press
DAMASCUS, Syria — American journalist Charles Glass said he locked up his two snoring Moslem kidnappers in a Beirut apartment before dawn yesterday and escaped to freedom after two months of captivity.
Syrian troops, whose government claimed a hand in Glass' freedom, whisked him from Beirut to Damascus, the Syrian capital, where he was handed over to U.S. Charge d'Affaires David Ransom.
Glass said he had no doubt he escaped on his own and that his captors did not allow him to flee.
A Reagan administration official in Washington, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said U.S. intelligence has concluded that "Iran ordered his kidnapping, so it is safe to assume Iran wa responsible for his release."
That official and a Syrian source suggested that Iran, under Syrian pressure to release Glass, had arranged the escape so the journalist's captors would be able to deny plausibly that they had freed him if questioned by rivals.
Glass, 36, left Damascus in a charter jet for London at 8:48 p.m. to be reunited with his wife, Fiona, and five children, official sources at Damascus airport reported. Reporters were barred from the airport when the plane, which the ABC-TV network provided, took off.
"I feel good," a beaming Glass said when he was turned over to Ransom by Syrian Foreign Minister Farouk Sharaa. "The people who really suffered were my wife and children. All I want to do now is get home. see my wife and children."
Hours earlier, he had fled from the south Beirut neighborhood of Bir el-Abed, a stronghold of pro-Iranian Shiite Moslem militants.
Sharaa said the Syrians had a hand in getting Glass out of captivity, but gave no details.
A Syrian source, who is closely connected with the Syrian military based in Lebanon, said Glass" Shite Moslem kidnappers allowed him to get away "so they would not appear to have bowed to Syrian pressure" to free the American.
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Jennifer Benjamin...Editor
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