Word: airstrips
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...after a two-day visit by California Congressman Leo Ryan. The Temple leader was outraged by the fact that a score of the cultists had asked Ryan to help them escape the colony. Ryan's party and the defectors had left Jonestown to fly home from a nearby airstrip. Jones knew of a plot by his group to shoot the pilot of one of the visitors' two planes. He was not aware, at first, that Ryan and four others in the party had already been ambushed and slain at the airfield...
...Pilot Riddel Marvin's pocket, however, the authorities found evidence indicating another objective: a smudged note giving the coordinates of a large clandestine airstrip in the area. The army, tipped off by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, had been waiting for the three Americans. According to intelligence, they were supposed to pick up six tons of grass and another American, who had been arrested last November after illegally flying into the country. The three are now being held in Colombia on illegal-entry charges, and DEA officials say they may be prosecuted for conspiracy to smuggle when allowed to return...
...another hearing in Guyana last week, Larry Layton, the cult member who pretended he wanted to return home with Congressman Leo Ryan and ended up taking part in the shooting at the airstrip, was charged with the Congressman's murder. Another cult survivor testified at Layton's pretrial hearing that Jones himself had talked about the need for Ryan's death and predicted that his plane would "fall out of the sky." Survivors returning to the U.S. have told the FBI that the cult's basketball team, to which Jones' natural son Stephan...
...survivors spent a night of terror in a small bar near the Port Kaituma airstrip. They feared that the Jonestown gunmen would return to finish their deadly task. Drinking coffee laced with rum through the long night, the defectors from Jones' colony told how far their community had fallen from their Utopian ideal. They lived in fear, one reported, because "Jim Jones said the Guyanese government gave him authority to shoot anybody who tried to leave...
After the Ryan party left for the airstrip, the two lawyers took a walk, comparing impressions of the visit. When they returned to the center of the village, they found all its residents assembled in the meeting hall. "You and Mark better not attend because tension is running pretty high against you," Jones told Garry. He and Lane retreated to a guest house several hundred feet from the pavilion...