UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
7A
Korean hostages end tour after Saturday's attack
The Associated Press
Monday, October 16, 1995
MOSCOW — Tourist buses packed Red Square and cobblestones were washed clean of blood yesterday, but psychological scars remained after 25 South Koreans were hijacked in broad daylight next to the Kremlin.
Russians and foreigners alike were jittery after Saturday's attack, which drew attention to the nation's soaring crime rate and dealt a painful blow to its image abroad.
"This is a beautiful place but so unpredictable," said Spanish tourist Felipe Gimeno, standing by his bus on a crisp fall day in the shadow of the Kremlin, Russia's premier tourist attraction.
A busload of South Korean tourists was seized by a gunman and held for nearly 10 hours until Russian commandos stormed the bus early yesterday and killed the assailant. The gunman was identified as a Russian, but authorities did not know his name or anything about him.
The 25 tourists, uninjured but badly shaken, cut short their tour of Russia and flew on to their next scheduled stop in Frankfurt, Germany.
The hijacking took place on a bridge behind the onion domes of St. Basil's Cathedral, one of the world's most recognizable buildings. The area is near the Kremlin, the seat of Russia's government.
Hours later, visiting Russian schoolchildrenromped around the area, but adults were more fearful. Gimeno, a 50-year-old professor from Valencia, acknowledged his tour group was
"This is not good for the Russian image with tourists," he said.
"very nervous."
The hijacking shocked even the most jaded Muscovites.
"Nothing is safe anymore," said 25-year-old
rina Petrova. "They were just tourists."
Kim Sok-kyu, South Korea's ambassador to Moscow, praised Russia's special services for
rescuing the tourists unharmed but said the ajacking "will affect the influx of Korean tourists to Russia in the near future."
Authorities also preferred to focus on the swift, effective work of the commandos rather than the crime itself. "Such things can happen in any country," said a police official who declined to give his name.
The Russian tourist
industry already has faced spiraling crime, a September grenade attack on the U.S. Embassy, threats of terrorism related to the war in breakaway Chechnva and fears of political instability
"Terrorists are taking the whole world hostage. But I think it's appropriate that this happened on Red Square, right next to Yeltsin's office," said a tour bus driver who gave his name only as Vitaly and said he was a critic of President Boris Yeltsin's government.
The gunman, said to have been in his early to mid-30's, brandished an AK-47 assault rifle when he boarded the bus late Saturday afternoon. He told the tourists they were hostages
and ordered them to draw the curtains, freed hostage Yun Dong-hyuk told the South Korean news agency Yonhap.
Irina Petrova Russian citizen
Scores of police ringed the bus, snipers crouched on a Kremlin tower and ambulances and fire trucks surrounded the scene for hours.
The gunman initially demanded $10 million but later lowered the demand to $1 million. Authorities paid him $500,000 after several
hours, and he released the hostages in groups until just four tourists and the Russian bus driver were left.
Then, after a bank truck pulled up and authorities apparently prepared to hand over another payment, about 20 commandos swarmed over the bus. They fired in the air and smashed windows as stun grenades exploded with searing flashes.
"All of a sudden, we heard gunshots and everybody ducked," Im Chil-sung, one of the five men still on the bus, told Yonhap. The gunmen hshot to death
within seconds. Police found a homemade bomb hidden on his body and a Makarov pistol with four bullets in the bus.
The gunman was shot to death
The remaining hostages, shaken and dazed,
were hustled from the bus.
In the midst of the crisis, the newly crowned Miss Russia emerged, following the pageant at a nearby hotel and told reporters she would offer her golden crown in exchange for the release of a hostage.
Authorities apparently did not take 19-year-old Yelena Matsina's offer seriously, and she left still in possession of her crown.
Algerian radicals planning more attacks
French journalists, Paris sites threatened
The Associated Press
PARIS — Algeria's most radical armed group has threatened more bombings in France — including one at the Eifel Tower — and drawn up a hit list of French journalists, a newspaper reported yesterday.
The weekly Journal de Dimanche quoted the head of France's police union, Jean-Louis Arajol, as saying he received information indicating
that new terrorist attacks were being planned against the Eiffel Tower, the Place de la Concorde and major department stores in Paris.
The newspaper said it had learned from unidentified sources that the Armed Islamic Group also had drawn up a list of mostly French television journalists targeted for assassination. Names of the journalists were not disclosed.
The group has claimed responsibility for a wave of bombings that have killed seven people and injured more than 130 since July 25. It wants to establish an Islamic state in Algeria, a North African country that was
a French colony until 1962.
However, the newspaper said French police were not certain the group had the ability to carry out its new threats, aimed at forcing Paris to end its support of Algeria's military-installed government.
More than 30,000 people have died in Algeria since the government canceled its 1992 elections, which the fundamentalist Islamic Salvation Front party was poised to win.
A Salvation Front representative said yesterday that French President Jacques Chirac — who will meet with Algerian President Liamine Zeroul later this month —
should urge Zeroual to meet with the opposition to find a way to end Algeria's civil war.
"If he truly wants to help the Algerian people, he has to try and push Gen. Zeroual to accept the conditions for serious negotiations," Anouar Haddam said in a French television interview from Washington, D.C.
The Salvation Front and other opposition parties are boycotting Algeria's Nov. 16 presidential election and are demanding that their leaders be freed from prison and that an interim government be named before elections.
Anti-nuclear group wins Nobel Peace Prize
The Associated Press
OSLO, Norway — Joseph Rotblat and the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs — which have worked tirelessly to rid the world of nuclear weapons — won the 1995 Nobel Peace Prize Friday.
The Norwegian Nobel committee said the London-based organization was cited "for the work to reduce nuclear weapons' place in international politics and in the longer term to get rid of such weapons."
Rotblat's organization was created in 1957. It has worked behind the scenes to get scientists to "take responsibility for their inventions," the citation said.
The citation also noted the group's "desire to see all nuclear arms destroyed and, ultimately, in a vision of other solutions to international disputes than war."
The Nobel Prize committee chairman, Francis Sejersted, in hailing Rotblat's work, condemned countries such as France and China for continuing to test nuclear weapons.
"One of the reasons for the prize is a sort of protest against testing of nuclear weapons and nuclear arms in general," Seiersted said.
Forty years ago, Rotblat and 10 other scientists issued a manifesto declaring that researchers must take responsibility for their creations, such as the atomic bomb.
The winners will be honored in Oslo on Dec. 10, the anniversary of the death of Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite who used his fortune to create the Nobel prizes. The peace prize is worth $1 million.
"The Manifesto laid the foundation for the Pugwash Conferences," the citation said. "The Conferences ... have underlined the catastrophic consequences of the use of the new weapons. They have brought together scientists and decision-makers to collaborate across political divides on constructive proposals for reducing the nuclear threat."
The peace prize is the only Nobel awarded in Oslo. The other five are presented in Stockholm, Sweden. All prizes are presented on Dec. 10, the anniversary of Nobel's death.
Former President Jimmy Carter was seen as a contender for the prize, for his mediation.
The peace prize caps a week of Nobel announcements.
Last week, Irish poet Seamus Heaney won the literature prize. American researchers Edward B. Lewis and Eric F. Wieschaus with German Christiane Nuesslein-Volhard won the medicine prize. American Robert E. Lucas Jr got the economics award, and Americans Martin L. Perl and Frederick Reines won in physics.
On Wednesday, Dutchman Paul Crutzen and Americans Mario Molina and Sherwood Rowland won the chemistry prize for alerting the world about ozone depletion.
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