A son of Mrs. Dora Bloch said yesterday that he knew the names of four members of the Ugandan secret police who had murdered his mother and would be willing to testify to a commission of inquiry in Uganda if President Idi Amin set one up. He did not believe, however, that the killers had been acting on orders from Amin.
Bertram Bloch said that the family had received this information in the past three weeks. The Israeli engineer was addressing journalists at the end of his stay in Britain during which he has been investigating his mother’s death in the wake of the Israeli rescue action at Entebbe Airport.
He also thought that no more witnesses of the murder were still alive in Uganda. However, he appealed to other witnesses, who had since left the country, to come forward to confirm what he had already been told.
Mrs. Bloch, who held dual British and Israeli citizenship, was a passenger on the Air France plane hijacked by pro-Palestinian terrorists to Uganda. Some of the passengers were freed by the terrorists and more than 100 were rescued by Israeli commandos on July 3. Mrs. Bloch was reportedly taken to a hospital in Kampala before the rescue operation. On July 13 a newspaper in Nairobi, Kenya; reported that the partly burned body of Mrs. Bloch was found in a forest 11 miles from Kampala, Uganda’s capital.
Bloch’s press conference was held at the House of Commons under the auspices of Labor MP Greville Janner, who has formed a group of MPs to keep a watch on the case. Bloch thanked Janner, his colleagues and the British government for their concern at the affair. Bloch is returning to Israel tomorrow.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
