At 6:40 AM, £26 million in gold and diamonds was stolen from a security depot near Heathrow Airport near London. Six masked gunmen overpowered security guards in a warehouse belonging to Brinks-Mat Ltd. They poured gasoline over the guards and threatened to set it afire it they did not cooperate. It was the largest single theft in British history. The gang gained entry to the warehouse from security guard Anthony Black, who was complicit in the robbery. Once inside, they poured petrol over the staff and threatened them with a lit match if they did not reveal the combination numbers of the vault. The robbers thought that they were going to steal around £1 million worth of Spanish pesetas, but they also found three tonnes (3,000 kg) of pure gold bullion outside the main vault in 6,840 bars in 76 cardboard boxes. The gold had been stored at the warehouse overnight before being due to be transferred to Hong Kong the next day. In addition, they stole platinum, 1,000 carats of diamonds and $250,000 of traveler’s cheques.
A number of those involved were ultimately convicted and imprisoned. Despite a record reward of £2 million offered for locating the gold, much of the three tonnes of stolen gold has never been recovered. £1 million of gold was found stored at the Bank of England. In 1996, about half of the gold, the portion which had been melted and recast, was thought to have found its way back into the legitimate gold market, including the reserves of the true owners, Johnson Matthey. According to the BBC, some have claimed that anyone wearing gold jewelry bought in the UK after 1983 is probably wearing Brink’s-Mat. The rest of the gold was believed to have been buried. Lloyd’s of London made a record insurance pay out of £26 million.
Romania appealed to the United States and the Soviet Union to resume missile talks and urged the superpowers to halt nuclear deployment in Europe. “It is necessary that any operation or emplacement of the American missiles in Europe be stopped,” a statement by the East European country’s top officials said. Likewise, Moscow should “stop any works of preparation for the emplacement of medium-range missiles… in the territory of East Germany and Czechoslovakia,” the officials added. Romania is generally considered a maverick within the East Bloc on foreign policy issues.
Poland denied a visitor’s visa to Senator Carl Levin (D-Michigan) because he refused to promise that he would not talk with leaders of the outlawed Solidarity union, Levin said. The lawmaker, who has many Polish-Americans among his constituents, said that no meetings were scheduled with Solidarity officials during his two-day visit. But he added: “If the opportunity arose, I would have met with them. And I’m certain the opportunity would have arisen.” Levin said the Polish Embassy notified him of the visa refusal less than 24 hours before his flight time for Warsaw.
Britons went without their national newspapers over the weekend because of a walkout by printers. The Newspaper Publishers Association, representing the owners, announced that the struck papers plan to sue the union, the National Graphical Association, for $365,000 each under new legislation that forbids secondary picketing by workers not directly involved in strikes.
Rauf Denktash, leader of the self-proclaimed Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, called for a review of the deployment of U.N. troops on Cyprus and charged that U.S. coercion has stopped Muslim nations from recognizing his new state. Denktash told reporters in the Turkish sector of Nicosia, the Cypriot capital, that he will seek changes in the deployment agreement covering the 2,350-strong U.N. force in Cyprus. The Security Council has declared the Turkish Cypriots’ declaration of independence illegal, and only Turkey and Bangladesh have recognized the new state.
Joseph Polowsky of Chicago was buried where he wished to be, in Torgau, East Germany, at the point by the Elbe River where the Red Army and Patton’s troops linked up 38 years ago. Mr. Polosky, a taxi driver and a veteran of World War II, died of cancer in Chicago on October 17. He led virtually a one-man campaign to build friendship between the United States and the Soviet Union and revive “the spirit of the Elbe.”
An assault on Tripoli was postponed by Palestinian rebels opposed to Yasser Arafat. A cease-fire held relatively firm, with only minor exchanges of sniper fire and rocket-propelled grenades. They said they wanted to give a Syrian-Saudi peace plan time to be put into place, but prospects for its quick installation appeared to be fading a day after all sides had approved the plan. The plan calls for all fighters to vacate Tripoli and “its environs” within two weeks and for political talks to resolve the split within the Palestinian guerrilla movement, specifically within the Palestine Liberation Organization that Mr. Arafat heads as chairman.
Egypt, which plans to generate 40 percent of its electricity from nuclear energy by the year 2000, received five bids today, including two from American companies, to build its first two nuclear power plants, the Electricity Minister, Mohamed Osman Abaza, said. Mr. Abaza said in an interview that the bids came from Westinghouse and Bechtel, and from France’s Framatome consortium, West Germany’s Kraftwerk Union and the Swiss-West German Brown-Boveri group. The first two reactors are scheduled to be built at Daba, 125 miles west of Alexandria at an estimated cost of $2.4 billion. Construction will start next year and the plants will be operational by about 1992, Mr. Abaza said.
UNESCO has condemned Israel for allegedly trying to obliterate the cultural identity of the Palestinian people, officials of the agency said. At the close of a five-week conference of the U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization in Paris, officials said the delegates adopted a resolution strongly criticizing Israel’s occupation of Arab territories and urging UNESCO’s leadership to press for the reopening of Bethlehem University and other Palestinian schools closed by Israel.
Chadian rebel leader Goukouni Oueddei is willing to join peace talks with Chad’s President Hissen Habre in Ethiopia next month, a rebel spokesman said in Paris. Habre agreed last week to the talks in Addis Ababa to try to end the long conflict in the Central African nation. Goukouni’s rebels, backed by Libya, were checked last summer when France sent troops to its former colony. They did not see action, and Chad remains divided between the opposing factions.
President Reagan’s visit to China, scheduled for April, might have to be called off, the Chinese Communist Party leader said, because of a recent Senate committee resolution on Taiwan. The measure affirms Taiwan’s right to determine its own future without coercion by Peking. The party leader, Hu Yaobang, said it constituted “interference in China’s domestic affairs.”
Philippine President Ferdinand E. Marcos made a major concession to his political opponents last week, but rather than easing the pressures on the faltering leader, it seemed only to intensify them. As the week ended, 110 Roman Catholic bishops released a pastoral letter — to be read in church today on what would have been the 51st birthday of Benigno S. Aquino Jr., the assassinated opposition leader — urging Mr. Marcos to end his “repressive decrees” and call new elections.
Foreign and Philippine business leaders, along with opposition politicians, had been demanding that the office of vice president be restored. They hoped this would increase chances for a smooth succession in case Mr. Marcos, rumored to be in poor health, should be unable to serve. (Under the existing system, a 15-member executive committee that included his wife, Imelda, and military leaders, would succeed him.) Uncertainty surrounding the succession, coupled with political unrest following the murder of Mr. Aquino in August, have caused doubts about stability and, with them, a serious economic decline.
Nicaragua’s Sandinista government has ordered 1,000 Cuban military advisers to leave the country, along with several Salvadoran guerrilla leaders, “so the United States has no pretext to invade,” government sources said. The sources, who all requested anonymity for security reasons, said that 1,000 Cubans, mostly military instructors, will leave Nicaragua this week. A group of 1,200 Cubans, mostly teachers and technicians, already have left, the sources said. Seven high-ranking Salvadoran guerrilla leaders have left as well, the sources added.
A top Liberian Army general has been shot dead, apparently by accident, during preparations for an attempted coup against the Liberian President, Samuel K. Doe, the Monrovia radio reported today. The radio, monitored here, said General Robert Sey, former Chief of Staff of the Liberian armed forces, had been shot by bodyguards of Brigadier General Thomas Quiwonkpa, said to be the leader of a plot to overthrow the Liberian leader.
Sir Anton Dolin, founding member of major ballet companies in Britain and the United States, and the first internationally acclaimed British male ballet star, died of a heart attack in Paris. He was 79 years old.
Tough security measures remained in force at the White House and other government buildings, but federal officials refused to explain why the unusual steps were taken last week. At least nine trucks loaded with dirt blocked entrances to the White House and the adjacent Executive Office Building, and police cars blocked entrances to the State Department. Security officials, clearly concerned that suicide bombings in Beirut against Marines and the U.S. Embassy could be repeated in Washington, would say only that the trucks were there for “security reasons.”
Federal officials are keeping mum on the whereabouts of Chinese diplomatic courier Gogiang Yang, whose request for asylum triggered a two-hour standoff on a Chicago airport runway over possession of diplomatic documents. The State Department refused to comment on the defector’s status, and the FBI referred calls to the Immigration and Naturalization Service. The White House said it is reviewing the asylum request. Officials at the Chinese Embassy in Washington also declined to discuss the incident, but in Tokyo, Hu Yaobang, general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, quipped, “Such a thing is possible, but you know, there are so many people in China, if just one of them leaves….”
A bigger political role for women is a commitment generally shared by Americans, a New York Times Poll has found, and half of the public said Congress would be improved by having more women as members.
A series of explosions at the fireworks company at Bellport, New York, that made President Reagan’s inaugural display leveled a warehouse and damaged up to 100 homes, killing two persons and injuring 23 others, authorities said. Fireworks went off in the air when the New York Pyrotechnic Products Co. warehouse blew up. Power was temporarily knocked out to 7,000 suburban Long Island customers. James Grucci, 42, son of the company’s founder and a company owner himself, and Dohna Gruber, 19, an employee who was his cousin, were killed in the blast, a police official said. The injured included the 78-year-old founder of the firm.
One of every five American adults says he or she has taken CPR training, according to a new Gallup Poll. In addition, 87% of the population has heard or read about the emergency first-aid technique known as cardiopulmonary resuscitation, the survey found. Of the 80% who have not taken such a course, nearly two-thirds (64%) express an interest in doing so. Used most often to revive heart-attack victims, CPR is helpful in cases of electrocution, drowning and other accidents in which immediate restoration of breathing can save lives.
A countdown began for the launching at 11 A.M. tomorrow from Cape Canaveral, Florida, of a 17-ton Spacelab. The $1 billion, European-built Spacelab, which is the size of a school bus, will be carried into orbit in the cargo bay of the space shuttle Columbia and operated by scientists throughout the nine-day mission.
Since Harold Washington became Chicago’s first black Mayor last April, he has been involved in a running feud with Alderman Edward R. Vrdolyak, who is leader of the City Council majority and chairman of the county Democratic organization. Mayor Washington has called Mr. Vrdolyak “a two-bit hustler,” and a host of other things. Mr. Vrdolyak, who is white, has said that 90 days ago he and his allies decided to curtail their “personal attacks” on the mayor. “We would see if he can govern,” Mr. Vrdolyak said, adding that his early assessment was “so far, no.”
Now the two Democrats are at odds over a report that Mr. Vrdolyak made an overture to the White House last June to offer his aid to President Reagan’s re-election bid. According to The Chicago Tribune, Mr. Vrdolyak was angry that the leaders of the national Democratic Party supported Mr. Washington in the mayoral race and, to get revenge, offered to engineer a Cook County endorsement of the Democratic Presidential candidate he thought most likely to lose to Mr. Reagan: Walter F. Mondale.
Land around a downtown Oak Ridge, Tennessee, building, where sediment from a creek near a nuclear weapon plant was dumped 25 years ago, contains high levels of radioactivity and 72 times the mercury in ordinary soil, officials say. The Department of Energy analyzed 82 soil samples taken near the civic center and municipal building and found that 64 of them contained up to 360 parts per million of mercury. Uncontaminated soil contains 0.01 to 4.7 parts per million.
Forty-one Laotian refugees evicted from a West Virginia farm where they had been offered a 99-year lease have traveled to Alabama to join other members of their tribe. The members of the Iu Mien tribe left Dawson, West Virginia, on Friday in buses and cars on the 13-hour trip to Montgomery, said Karen Cadle, a volunteer who worked with the refugees. She said several residents of Dawson turned out to say goodbye. “There were lots and lots of promises to write and prayers that everything will go well for them,” she added.
The Laotians were thrown off a Greenbrier County, West Virginia, farm by Jerry Thompson of San Francisco, who had offered them a 99-year lease on his 873-acre property near Dawson after seeing them living in poverty. But when they were evicted, Mr. Thompson accused them of being “professional welfare recipients.” They had not received any government assistance in West Virginia, Miss Cadle said.
A baffling disorder has attacked Albert B. Sabin, developer of a vaccine that helped conquer polio. The 77-year-old specialist in paralytic diseases is partly paralyzed.
Assertions that the Navy rigged bidding procedures last year to favor the Navy over civilian contractors in the manning of government vessels is being investigated by the Justice Department.
The second dangerous snowstorm in a week headed toward the Plains, dropping as much as a foot of snow on the Rockies and icing roads from Arizona to South Dakota. Drifts up to four feet deep forced the closing of more than 200 miles of I-70 from Goodland, Kansas, to Denver. Blizzard warnings were in effect for northwestern Kansas and northeastern Colorado, with winter storm warnings over eastern Colorado and its mountains and portions of Wyoming, Oklahoma, Texas and New Mexico. The storm prompted storm watches for parts of South Dakota, Nebraska, Missouri, Iowa, Minnesota and Wisconsin. The storms were blamed for 27 deaths, including seven in Arizona; four in Iowa; three in Utah and Wyoming; two each in Montana, Minnesota, New York and Colorado, and one each in North Dakota and Wisconsin.
Born:
Matt Garza, MLB pitcher (Minnesota Twins, Tampa Bay Rays, Chicago Cubs, Texas Rangers, Milwaukee Brewers), in Selma, California.
Chris Hughes, American businessman and co-founder of Facebook, in Hickory, North Carolina.
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