Word: moluccans
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...Senior Writer Ed Magnuson described the conspiracy theory that surrounds the assassination of Ray's victim, Martin Luther King Jr. Our Nation staff pieced together the Ray saga, as our World and International staffs began work on another late-breaking story, the Dutch marine attack on the South Moluccan kidnapers; their story on the raid includes an eye-witness account by TIME'S Peter Kronenberg...
...dawn broke, a thick mist rolled across the pastureland around the Dutch hamlet of De Punt, enveloping the motionless yellow train. Inside, nine jittery Moluccan hijackers and 51 exhausted hostages were beginning their 20th day of cold fear together, a grisly endurance record of its kind. At a primary school in the nearby village of Bovensmilde, four other Moluccan terrorists kept four schoolteachers prisoner. Deployed around both the train and the school was an estimated 2,000-man army of crack Dutch commando marines, a special squad of sharpshooters, and armored military-police units...
Creating Trouble. The kidnapers were South Moluccan rebels with a history of creating trouble in The Netherlands. In December 1975 another group of terrorists seized the Indonesian consulate in Amsterdam and a train on the Utrecht-Groningen rail line (TIME, Dec. 15, 1975). Before that 15-day ordeal ended with the surrender of 14 Moluccans, three train passengers had been executed and a fourth hostage fell to his death from a consulate window...
Dutch society. Most are stateless, refusing Dutch citizenship. They keep largely to themselves, living in 63 government settlements. One of those ghettos is on the outskirts of Bovensmilde, a tidy, archconservative community in The Netherlands' "Bible belt." Young Moluccan radicals, many of whom have never seen their homeland, organized a government-in-exile for "the Republic of the South Moluccas" and demanded support to regain their islands. Dutch refusal to recognize their republic has led to increasing Moluccan terrorism...
Until the children were released, Van Agt announced, the government would not consider Moluccan demands, which included freedom for 21 comrades imprisoned for earlier plots and a 747 jet to take them all to safety. The Moluccans warned of "many deaths" if their demands were not met within two days, but that deadline passed without murder. At one point, however, terrified children were herded to schoolroom windows at gunpoint and forced to chant "Van Agt, we want to live...