RED TERRORIST ARRESTED

Hawke's Bay Herald-Tribune, Volume 81, Issue 65, 9 December 1937, Page 5

RED TERRORIST ARRESTED

-Press Aesociation.)

Fcrmer Cheka President Falls •yr , in Soviet Purge l DIPLOMAT AS FUGITIVE

(By Telegraph-

(Beceived 9, 1.5 p.m.) LONDON, Dec. 8. The Daily Teelgraph's" Moscow correspondent understands that Jacob Jeters, famous Lettish president of the Cheka during the Bed Terror in 1919-20, has been arrested. The arrests are also rumoured of Valeri Mechlau, vice-presi-dent of the Council of People 's Coinmissars, and his brother Ivan Mechlau, Soviet Commissioner at the Paris Exhibition. Peters lived in London in 1908-17, when he was deported to Bussia. As president of the Cheka he personally carried out the "Bed First of May" terror in 1919. The Paris correspondent of the Times says that following an order to return to Moscow with which he refuses to comply, M. Alexander Barmin, the counsellor of the Soviet Legation at Athens since 1934, has arrived in France. He asks the French Government to allow him to stay as a poi!tieal emigre. He has also appealed to the Central Committee of the League for Defence of the Bights of Man for energetic action to save the lives of numeroas Soviet diplomats now imprisoned in Moscow, and also on behalf of those still at their posts abroad, who, he says, "must choose between riskiug death in a Moscow prison if they return home or murder by secret agents if they stay abroad."