FIRE SALE! Probers Revive Hope That Wallenberg Is Alive Montreal (JTA) — An international commission that visited Soviet prisons this summer in an effort to establish the fate of Raoul Wallenberg has reached the preliminary conclusion that the Swedish diplomat miss- ing since 1945 may possibly still be alive somewhere in the vast Gulag that is the Soviet penal system. In any event, the commis- sion believes it has "incontrovertible evidence" that Mr. Wallenberg did not die in 1947 in Lubyanka prison, as the Soviets have insisted until recently. The commission consists of experts from several coun- tries, including the Soviet Union, in the fields of law, science, politics, academia and other humanities. It began its "search for the truth" about Mr. Wallenberg's fate on Aug. 27 and concluded the first phase of the search last mon- th. The commission's mem- bers included Mr. Wallenberg's half-brother, physicist Guy von Dardel of Sweden; biochemistry Pro- fessor Marvin Makinen of the University of Chicago, an American who was once a political prisoner in Vladimir prison in the Soviet Union; and Professor Irwin Cotler, a professor of law at Montreal's McGill University and a human rights advocate. Prof. Cotler, who has been probing for years to get at the truth about Mr. Wallenberg, described the commission's findings and explained the conclusions it has reached so far. What made the most re- cent effort unique, he said, is that the Soviets, who for 45 years refused to allow any outside investigation into Mr. Wallenberg's whereabouts, agreed to co- operate fully with the com- mission in an "open-ended" investigation. Soviet officials agreed to open their prisons, prison archives and dossiers for scrutiny by the commission, archives that had not been made available to outsiders at least since 1917. The investigation, unear- thing evidence damaging to the Soviets, found, for exam- ple, that the Soviets never conducted their own in- vestigations into Mr. Wallenberg's fate, although they gave many assurances . QUALITY GAS LOG SPECIALS! Gas log sets add beauty and warmth with the simple turn of a knob. Clean and efficient these realistic logs are safer than wood. There are no sparks, creosote, stack fires, or pollution and smoke. Installation is available. The realistic 6 log set shown above is regularly $169, on special *now for $139. PRE--SEASON SALE Also see our large collection of grates, tool sets, & custom glass doors NOVI - 48700 Grand River - 348-0090 • LIVONIA - 522-9200 - 29500 W. 6 Mile Rd. 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Prison archives were not scrutinized, nor were offi- cials or relevant witnesses examined off the record or under oath. Alexander Semyonova, the warden at Butyrka prison, was quoted as saying that "Mr. Wallenberg was a non- person for us until 1988, an unmentionable. We couldn't even talk about him before that, let alone investigate if he had been imprisoned here." It was quickly established by the commission that the official Soviet stance on Mr. Wallenberg had no em- pirical foundation. Certainly there was none to substantiate the Feb. 6, 1957, memorandum of then The Soviets agreed to cooperate fully with the commission. Soviet Foreign Minister An- drei Gromyko, stating that Mr. Wallenberg died of a heart attack at Lubyanka on July 17, 1947. The commission centered its examination on prisons where Mr. Wallenberg was reported to have been seen alive after that date. It spent a full week at Vladimir prison, the site of much of the witness testimony of the 1950s. It learned that foreigners incarcerated there at the time were generally registered under a number or a false identity. Subse- quent investigation at Butyrka corroborated that finding. The commission's study of prisoner files, registration documents and other sup- port materials allowed for the placement of Mr . Wallenberg in prisons where he had reportedly been seen over the years. "Analysis clearly con- firms, by way of a clinical on- site investigation (of the prisons), the actual presence of those witnesses who gave testimony that they had seen Mr. Wallenberg alive," Mr. Cotler stated. "We now have proof of the existence of 15 of these in- dividuals, something we did not have before." The commission discovered that in addition to personal prison files, there were parallel .