KEY POINTS:
The grisly truth about the disappearance of a British woman believed to have been murdered on the orders of the Ugandan dictator Idi Amin has been revealed for the first time in secret papers released by the British Government.
Dora Bloch, a 74-year-old grandmother, was a passenger on
an Air France plane from Athens to Paris when it was hijacked by Palestinian terrorists and forced down at Entebbe Airport, Uganda, in 1976.
During the hijack Bloch was taken ill after choking on some food and released so that she could be treated in a hospital in Kampala.
Days later, Israeli commandos stormed the airport, killing all the terrorists and destroying half of Amin's air force.
But in the aftermath of the raid there was no sign of Bloch either in the hospital or with the released hostages who were flown back to Israel.
It was always believed that a humiliated Amin wreaked his revenge on her and that the day after the raid she was dragged from her hospital bed and taken away. But it has never been clear how she died and Amin always denied any involvement.
Now confidential Cabinet papers released under the Freedom of Information Act show that the British High Commission in Kampala received a report from a Ugandan civilian that Bloch had been shot and her body dumped in the boot of a car which had Ugandan intelligence services number plates. The same informant said the body of a white woman had been found in a sugar plantation 30km from the capital.
A further intelligence report says the face had been badly burned, making identification very difficult, but that the legs looked "bad" and could have had leg ulcers which doctors confirmed Bloch was suffering. The policeman guarding Bloch was also murdered, said the report.
Bloch's death, ignored in the Oscar-nominated film of Amin's life, The Last King of Scotland, provoked outrage in the British parliament.
The secret papers go on to describe the British Government's repeated requests for information about the whereabouts of Bloch, who was on her way to her son's wedding in New York, as well as Amin's denials of any involvement in her killing.
In the absence of any satisfactory explanation, the British withdrew their high commissioner from Kampala and later broke off diplomatic relations with Uganda.
A confidential Foreign Office memo written by James Hennessy, who was British High Commissioner to Uganda, says: "She had been seen by a consultant at Mulago Hospital last Sunday long after the Israeli commandos had come and gone. Since then she had not been seen anywhere.
"Our information was that she had been dragged from her bed at hospital screaming. Though she had been living in Israel she was a British national and our responsibility."
The file also reveals that Amin took personal control of negotiations with the hijackers, getting the hostages from the plane into the terminal, providing food and washing facilities and postpone the first deadline. "For none of this had he received any thanks in the British newspapers," the report says.
- INDEPENDENT
