I
2A - The Michigan Daily - Thursday, March 27, 1997
- NATION/WORLD
49 bodies fiund in Calif., mass suicide
'sAngeles Tues
SAN DIEGO - Police found at least
49 bodies in a luxurious home in the elite
northern San Diego county suburb of
Rancho Santa Fe last night and described
the gruesome scene as a mass suicide.
Distraught neighbors said they
believed members of a religious cult or
sbme out-of-state group had been living
at the ranch house. They reported that
the people living in the house dressed in
black and called themselves monks.
Deputies reportedly approached the
sprawling ranch house after receiving a
phone tip. One told a television reporter
that he stopped tallying the bodies after
he had counted 10.
District Attorney Paul Pfingst said
the count was at least 49, and deputies
said all the bodies were male. "This is a
Jonestown," Pfingst said.
As media helicopters roared over-
head, sheriff's deputies congregated the
residence on Colina Norte. The home,
like most in the posh neighborhood of
Rancho Santa Fe, was set in lush, palm-
fringed grounds complete with tennis
courts and a swimming pool.
Property records show that the nine-
bedroom, seven-bathroom home on
more than three acres of land was sold in
May 1994 to a married couple for $1.325
million. The home was considered
owner-occupied, though the buyers -
Sam Koutchesfahani and his wife Fatt
Maghadam Yekta - maintain a post-
office box in Rancho Santa Fe.
A prominent San Diego criminal
defense attorney, Milton Silverman Jr.,
called a local radio station to say he rep-
resented Koutchesfahani. Silverman
said his client had rented the two-story
home to a religious group several
months ago and was trying to sell it for
$1.6 million.
Neighbor Bill Strong said the new ten-
ants moved in last fall and were quiet. "I
never heard them speak," he said.
Strong, who lives next door to the home
where the bodies were discovered, said
he saw five or six adults but no children
coming in and out of the property.
"They were very low key," agreed
neighbor Carol Kaplan.
And Drummond Doroski, a 16-year
old resident of Colina Norte, said the res-
idents of the home "weren't really
social."
A real estate agent, who did not want
to be named, said she tried to show the
home to buyers but "there was always
some sort of religion meeting going on."
The deaths jarred neighbors in the
tranquil neighborhood of Rancho Santa
Fe - known more for its genteel
debates over proper landscaping aes-
thetics than for its cults or criminals.
The last time their neighborhood
received such notoriety was back in
1992, when a mysterious English busi-
nessman named Ian Spiro apparently
shot his wife and three children to death
in their home and then committed sui-
cide by swallowing cyanide in a remote
desert spot.
The Spiro case bedeviled local resi-
dents because, even though police con-
cluded that Spiro killed his family and
committed suicide, conspiracy theories
about the deaths abounded. Spiro's
background as an intelligence operative
on the fringes of Middle East espionage
offered ample ground for theories about
assassins and terrorists targeting the
entire family.
The neighbors' talk about a religious
cult sparked memories of other mass sui-
cides. The most notorious in recent years
having been the murder-suicides of fol-
lowers of the Order of the Solar Temple,
a cult based in Switzerland but with
branches in Europe and Canada. Just this
week, five followers of the cult died after
rigged propane tanks caught fire in a
house they were occupying about 40
miles southwest of Quebec City.
Joe Camel advertising debate revived
WASHINGTON -Three years after rejecting claims that the controversii4 Joe
Camel cigarette ads are targeted at children, the Federal Trade Commission
revealed yesterday that it has new evidence in the case and that its investigators are
once again urging a complaint against R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co., Camel's ma ,
for unfair advertising.
The disclosure revives one of the most bitter controversies in the nation's ciga-
rette wars and comes as yet another blow to the beleaguered cigarette industry.Last
week, another manufacturer, the Liggett Group, admitted that nicotine is addictive
and that the industry markets to underage smokers in an historic legal settlement.
The FTC, which enforces truth-in-advertising laws, declined to say what new
evidence has become available. "There is new evidence from 1994," said Victoria
Streitfeld, the agency's spokesperson. "I cannot talk about what that is." i
But experts in tobacco litigation said the Food and Drug Administration's effort
to regulate cigarette advertising, as well as state lawsuits against the industry;.have
recently yielded confidential documents that could bolster an FTC case against
Reynolds, the nation's second-largest cigarette manufacturer.
"There are internal documents that have come out that indicate R.J. Reynolds had
begun in the early 1970s to become ... envious of Philip Morris because Marlboro
had a lock on the kiddie market,' said Dick Daynard, a tobacco litigation expert.
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Panel recommends
hepatitis C test
BETHESDA, Md. -If a person has
used injection drugs, even a few times,
and has had multiple sex partners, a test
for hepatitis C should be considered,
the head of an independent panel con-
vened by the National Institutes of
Health to examine how to manage this
emergingthreat said yesterday.
Dr. D.W Powell of the University of
Texas Medical Branch at Galveston,
chair of a 2 1/2-day conference that
drew 1,600 doctors and researchers
from around the country, said that "a
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lion Americans who have chronic
hepatitis C do not know they are carri-
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"But we do know it is transmitted by
high-risk practices such as drug use
and high-risk sexual activity. Those
people should consider being tested,"
he said.
Hepatitis C is primarily transmitted
by blood-to-blood contact, such as
sharing needles for drugs, although a
percentage of cases are believed to be
transmitted sexually. Blood trapsfu-
sions that occurred before 1990, when
a screen for the;virus began to be used
for blood donors, also were a mayor
source of infection.
One of the issues the panel tackled is
the fact that there are no sure-fire tests
for hepatitis C.
N.Y. mayor, groups
fight welfare law ;
Coalitions of civil rights groups and
the mayor of New York yesterday filed
separate suits to block a key provL'
of the nation's new welfare law, cha -
ing that it violates the constitutional
rights of legal immigrants who ,will
lose federal disability and food stamp
benefits because they are not citizens.
The suits charge that the law violates
the equal protection clause of the
Constitution by specifically targeting a
particular group and stripping thetn of
federal benefits that are provided to
every other legal resident who m*
the basic criteria of the programsI
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Irish terrorists bomb
English town
LONDON - Irish terrorists sent
fresh signals of frustration and defi-
ance to Britain yesterday with two
bomb blasts that punctuated a national
election campaign and saluted the
anniversary of the republican struggle
against British rule in Northern
Ireland.
There were no injuries in the twin
attacks, but they brought chaos to the
national rail network in the aftermath
of an audacious escape plan by hard-
core Irish Republican Army prison-
ers that was foiled at a jail near
Belfast.
The bombs, blamed by police and
the British and Irish governments on
the IRA, exploded a half-hour apart
early yesterday morning in the northern
English town of Wilmslow, an affluent
suburban community and important
junction about 160 miles northwest of
London. Police think the bombs were
placed and timed so that the second
would strike emergency personnel
responding to the first. It narrowly
missed.a
The explosions toreup tracksI
destroyed signaling equipment,.c-
pling service between London and the
nearby northern metropolis. of
Manchester, whose downtown shop-
ping area was savaged by a huge IRA
bomb last June.
Yeltsin bans some;
foreign crpurchases
MOSCOW - There aren't o
many T-Birds among them, but
President Boris Yeltsin is in any case
taking the Russian leadership's flashy
cars away.
Yeltsin proclaimed a ban yesterday
on foreign car purchases from state cof-
fers as of next Tuesday, and he ordered
those already imported at taxpayer
expense to go to the auction block,
The moves are expected to win cheers
from a struggling population and coo
mute today's nationwide labor strike.
- Compiled fromn.Daily wire reports.
Heading Home
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