The Sunday Observer asserted today, in a dispatch from Prague, that Czechoslovakia had unexpectedly reopened the case of Charles H. Jordan, the Joint Distribution executive vice-chairman who died mysteriously in Prague last August during a vacation visit. The dispatch said that Czech authorities, strengthened by recent changes in the nation’s Communist party leadership, were “giving strong hints” that those responsible for Jordan’s death were not Czech secret police, as had been rumored, but “Russian counter-intelligence.”
The dispatch said the Czechs were “openly linking” Jordan’s death with the “murder” in Zurich last year of the Swiss pathologist Ernest Hardmeir, who did a postmortem on Jordan’s body. Dr. Hardmeir was found, frozen to death, near Zurich, but Swiss authorities said then there was no evidence of foul play. It was reported here that there was no evidence from any other source in support of the Observer dispatch. The Czech Government took the position that the postmortem had shown no evidence of violence and that Jordan died from drowning.
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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.
