Word: elrom
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Adding to Turkey's political malaise is the increasing activity of left-wing urban guerrilla groups, many of them composed of students or graduates from the universities. The guerrillas last year carried out a campaign of violence that culminated in the kidnap-murder of Israeli Consul General Ephraim Elrom. Terrorist Leader Mahir Cayan and a cadre of guerrillas from an organization called the Turkish People's Liberation Army were convicted of that crime and were in Istanbul's Maltepe Prison awaiting final sentencing. But they escaped four months ago, kidnaped three NATO radar experts serving...
Something was indeed wrong. Three hours earlier, four armed toughs from Turkey's extreme leftist People's Liberation Army, a guerrilla movement trained in Syria with Soviet backing, had entered the Elroms' apartment building. In a ground floor flat directly under the consul general's, they methodically overpowered and trussed up twelve people while waiting for Elrom's predictable 1 p.m. arrival. When the diplomat arrived and resisted, they slugged him on the head with a pistol butt and carried him off, wrapped in a gray blanket in the back seat...
...kidnaping incensed-and embarrassed-the two-month-old, military-backed government of Premier Nihat Erim. Eleven provinces have been under strict martial law since the end of April, yet the Liberation Army, which abducted and then released five U.S. servicemen earlier this year, was still able to nab Elrom...
...detained. The government also introduced a law in the Turkish Parliament making kidnaping punishable by death-even for those who simply withhold information concerning the crime. Istanbul's 6,000-man police force, meanwhile, combed the city, concentrating on the European side of the Bosporus. A note from Elrom had been mailed to his wife from Aksaray, a district in Istanbul's old quarter. "I am O.K.," he wrote. "Do not worry...
...Elrom is the first Israeli diplomat to become a victim of urban guerrilla warfare anywhere, and the Israeli Cabinet promptly backed Turkey's tough stand against his abductors. A 23-year veteran of Israel's police force, Elrom was born Ephraim Hofstaedter in Poland, but after becoming a diplomat in 1969, he adopted a Hebrew surname-as is required of its envoys by the Israeli foreign service. Former head of Israel's criminal investigation department, Elrom was a key figure in gathering the evidence on which Adolf Eichmann was convicted, and acted as one of Eichmann...