Answering Blast

At Famagusta's Hereon movie theater, where for the past ten years the screen has often been filled with the gun smoke of U.S.-made westerns, the shooting began earlier than usual one day last week. It was midmorning. and crowds milled through the busiest shopping area of Cyprus' third-largest city (pop. 21,100). Five pistol shots rang out and, just ten yards from the Hereon's box office, a man slumped to the sidewalk, wounded in face, chest, abdomen and hand. The gunman fired a sixth shot and disappeared among the shoppers. The victim, who died a short while later, was a man especially disliked by EOKA terrorists: William Dear, 61-year-old police interrogator of the Special Branch. He was the first Englishman killed since the Greek Cypriot underground declared its truce 13 months ago.

Searching the neighborhood, police found ten bombs, twelve detonators and nine bullets beneath the bed of Projectionist Georghios Kaliyorou, 20, who had living quarters in the movie theater. Kaliyorou himself was nowhere to be found. British army explosive experts insisted that the bombs, oozing nitroglycerin, were too dangerous to move, and two hours later got telephone permission from Governor Sir Hugh Foot for what Cypriots angrily denounced as a deliberate reprisal. The men were authorized to blow up the bombs where they were--inside the three-story movie house right in the middle of Famagusta.

Almost in tears, Georghios Papageorghiou, plump owner of the theater he had spent $123,000 on, begged the British: "Let me carry the bombs out. Someone carried them in. They can't be all that dangerous." But as dusk neared, houses and shops adjoining the theater were cleared, police cordoned off adjoining streets, a siren warned everyone away. At 6:51 p.m., in a sheet of flame and with a blast that rocked Famagusta's old north wall, the British exploded the bombs. The top two stories of the theater's living quarters collapsed, snapping telephone poles, piling rubble atop nearby shops. Hundreds of seats in the theater were shattered. The British refused to listen to Owner Papageorghiou's claims for $56,000 compensation, and in protest, other movie houses in Famagusta shut down.

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