PICTON’S STATEMENT.

Gisborne Times, Volume VII, Issue 383, 7 April 1902, Page 2

PICTON’S STATEMENT.

By Telegraph—Press AssociationCopyright. LONDON, April 5.- . Lieutenant Picton, who was cashiered in connection with the shooting, arrived by the steamer Canada. In the course of an interview with the Daily Mail representative, he stated that Captain Hunt’s party of Carbineers attacked Barand Viljoen’s farm, at Duivelssroop in September. Hunt was left wounded on the verandah., Next day Morant and Handcock found Hunt’s body, stripped and brutally, kicked in the face, the legs slashed „ with a knife, one of the eyes gouged * out, and the neck broken. Mr Reuter, a missionary at the station where Hunt was buried, so Picton alleged, confirmed this. Morant and Handcock swore revenge, and ' ordered that ’if the murderers were captured no quarter be given them. A Boer caught dressed in Hunt’s clothes got short shrift. Later eight others were captured. A' drumhead court-martial showed that they belonged to the same party. .They, were executed. Revenge, and not plunder, was the, motive. They considered that the laws of war justified the executions. The story about obtaining twenty, thousand pounds from the Boer waggons was a lie’ Mrs Schiel, wife of Colonel Schiel, who was a prisoner, proved that Morant and Handcock were at a farm house forty miles away on the night Heese, the German missionary, was murdered. Morant, in his dying statement, protested his innocence.

LORD KITCHENER’S REPORT^ “NO EXTENUATING CIRCUMSTANCES.” By telegraph—Press AssociationCopyright. MELBOURNE, April 6, Lord Kitchener has cabled to Lord Hopetoun the details of the shooting. It confirms the particulars already received through the War Office. Lord Kitchener says : “ There were, in my opinion, no extenuating circumstances-.”