The British government is being urged to take Uganda to the International Court of Justice over the case of Mrs. Dora Bloch, the murdered Entebbe hijack hostage. Labor MP Greville Janner will make the request to Foreign Secretary David Owen in the light of a statement by Uganda’s former Health Minister that Mrs. Bloch, a 73-year-old grandmother with British and Israeli nationality, was killed by President Idi Amin’s secret police on the day after the Israeli rescue raid at Entebbe last July 4.
Janner, who has been acting here on behalf of Mrs. Bloch’s two sons in Israel, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency today that “By a quirk of fate” Uganda recognized the jurisdiction of the International Court of Justice when it was a British colony and did not alter its position on becoming independent.
The new claim that Mrs. Bloch was murdered by Amin’s State Research Bureau is made today by Henry Kyemba, Uganda’s former Health Minister, who fled secretly to Britain following last month’s World Health Organization conference in Geneva. The State Research Bureau is answerable only to the President. It does not act on its own initiative, Kyemba explained.
Interviewed in the Sunday Times, Kyemba said that he visited Mrs. Bloch in Mulago Hospital in Kampala, on July 3. “I wanted to make sure she was quite comfortable and reassure her that she would be looked after. She had a private room on the sixth floor. I asked her how she was and she said he was alright except she was very concerned about her son, who was also one of the hostages. I told her not to worry,” Kyemba told the Times.
That was on the day before the Israeli raid on Entebbe. Next morning, Kyemba returned to the hospital and considered the problem of Mrs. Bloch. “I knew she was still there and I knew that with the Israeli raid having happened her person was in considerable danger. I didn’t know what to do with her.” Kyemba confirmed that at 6 p.m. that evening Peter Chandley, Commercial Attache at the British High Commission, visited her. He agreed to get her some food but when he returned he was refused entry at the gate and eventually went home.
LAST HOURS ‘TERRIBLE’
Describing Mrs. Bloch’s last hours as “terrible,” Kyemba said “Some time between 8:30 and 9 p.m. two agents from the State Research Bureau” went to the hostage’s room. “Warning the guard outside Mrs. Bloch’s room not to interfere, the two agents burst through the double doors and unceremoniously dragged the old lady out of her bed. She screamed in terror and began to struggle. As she was pulled into the corridor, he terrible shrieks brought staff running and other patients to their doors. “No one lifted a finger to help her. Anyone who interfered would have been killed. Still screaming and struggling, Mrs. Bloch was rushed to the stairs and dragged down three floors. At the age of 73, she could only walk with difficulty and the walking stick she normally used was left behind in her room. She virtually fell down six flights of stairs,” Kyemba said.
“On the third floor, she was dragged in her hospital gown right through the casualty departmental, where patients were waiting on rows of benches for treatment. She cried for them to help her. No one moved.”
Kyemba added “The last they or anyone else saw of Mrs. Bloch was as she was pushed through the doors on to the street. Two cars were waiting outside with their engines running. Mrs. Bloch was bundled into the back seat of one of them and they drove off.”
News of the abduction was phoned to Kyemba at home who immediately rang up Amin. The President “expressed offhand surprise at what his angry Minister of Health had to say. “Is that so?” he said. “I will look into It.” Half an hour later, Amin phoned Kyemba back, made small talk for a couple of minutes and then said? “Oh, by the way, you know that woman? Forget her. They have already finished her.”
DOCTOR CONFIRMS STORY
The man who claims to have been the last white person to have seen Mrs. Bloch olive is Dr. C. A. Bonnini, an Italian who spent two years as a consultant surgeon at Mulago Hospital and who now works in Milan. Interviewed in The Observer, he said he last saw her alive at Mulago at about 5:30 p.m. on July 4. His account differs only in minor details from that of Kyemba.
Dr. Bonnini says that the French Ambassador had sent two members of his staff to look for her. “Finally I got to the room where Mrs. Bloch was in bed,” he said. “I gave her the news of the raid. She was very happy to hear about it naturally. She seemed in excellent spirits and asked me when she could hope to be released from the hospital. As she had completely recovered from a minor operation I said I would see what I could do to get her discharged the following morning.”
Dr. Bonnini returned to the operating room where he had been treating some of the Ugandans injured in the Israeli raid. Next morning he went immediately to the Indian doctor who was looking after Mrs. Bloch. The Indian told him that four Africans in civilian clothes had arrived at about 8:30 the previous evening and taken her away by force. Mrs. Bloch screamed and struggled but she was dragged away. This was confirmed to Bonnini by ward nurses who said that when Mrs. Bloch got to the lift she was struggling so hard that the Africans strangled her to keep her quiet “and that she was most likely dead by the time she was taken out of the hospital building.”
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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.
