Word: timorous
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Main Danger. Trouble also broke out in another colonial quarter-the tiny island of Timor (pop. 650,000), situated in the midst of the Indonesian archipelago. Last week one of the island's fledgling independence parties, using ancient Mausers, Sten guns and Timorese cutlasses, staged a bizarre coup, seizing the police headquarters and the radio station and demanding independence from Portugal...
...instigator of the coup was the Timor Democratic Union (U.D.T.) which had always advocated a gradual approach to independence and a continuing association with Portugal. One possible explanation for the U.D.T.'s action was that it had joined forces with another independence party, Fretelin, to crush a third party that advocates eventual union with Indonesia...
Things went wrong from the start. One team of four set off in mid-afternoon in a rented yellow Morris Marina to strike at the Nicosia residence of Israeli Ambassador Rahamim Timor. Caught in heavy traffic that threatened to wreck their timetable, the Arabs raced conspicuously down the oncoming traffic lane of Grivas Avenue and through a series of red traffic lights. Other cars had to brake suddenly to avoid collisions, and one of these cars was driven by an off-duty policeman. He immediately alerted headquarters to have the "crazy driver" of the Morris picked up "before he kills...
While police were closing in on the Arabs as traffic violators, the would-be assassins screeched to a halt outside the three-story apartment building where Ambassador Timor lives with his wife and two children. One Arab fired a burst of his submachine gun at a Cypriot policeman on guard outside the building, seriously wounding him in the chest. Another planted a large handbag filled with dynamite at the main entrance. The Arabs were apparently unaware of two things: that there was another entrance closer to Timor's apartment, and that Timor had already left, five minutes earlier...
When the explosion went off, it blew a huge hole in a Greek Cypriot's ground-floor apartment but caused relatively little damage to Timor's quarters. Nobody inside the building was injured. The dynamiter himself was flung to the ground, however, and the getaway car was wrecked. The other three guerrillas left their comrade behind and commandeered another vehicle at gunpoint. They got only 50 yards before they rounded a curve and crashed head-on into a police car looking for the traffic violators. They surrendered, and the injured dynamiter was arrested later at a hotel where...