dated August 20, 1951: Abdullah assassination case opens

The case against ten conspirators accused of plotting and assassinating King Abdullah of Jordan opened on the 18th in Abdali, an Arab Legion Training Depot near Amman. Attorney- General Walid Shah told the Military Court the plotters sent a letter with an order by a religious leader to the Arab gunman Mustapha Shukri Usho. The order read: ``Kill, and thou shalt be safe.'' But, despite that assurance in the letter. Colonel Abdullah Tell, ex-Military Governor of Jerusalem, had given instructions that the killer, made to act alone, be slain at once thereafter to shield the instigators of the crime. The Attorney- General said Colonel Tell had wanted to know the name of the assassin before-hand, ``to enable him to obtain funds, in case other quarters should claim they had assassinated the King.'' The gunman, who fired three fatal bullets into the King's head and chest at the El Agsa Mosque on July 20, was a Jerusalem tailor, and a member of the Arab Dynamite Squad involved in Arab-Jewish fighting. The prosecution named Col. Tell and Dr. Musa Abdullah Husseini as the chief plotters of ``the most dastardly crime Jordan ever witnessed''; there was evidence that they had decided, before the end of April 1950, to do away with King Abdullah. Col. Tell and another accused, Musa Ahmed Ayubi, a former Jerusalem vegetable merchant, were absent. A cable from Cairo said they were in the Egyptian capital. Jerusalem sources added that Col. Tell had been in close contact with the Ex-Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin el Husseini, and his adherents in Arab Palestine. Dr. Musa Husseini and seven other accused were marched into the court room in single file under strong guard. One of them, a Franciscan friar, Father Rahim Ayyad, was accused of using a radio transmitter in his lodgings in Jerusalem to keep in touch with the Vatican.

Indian Muslims' memorandum to Frank Graham

Fourteen Indian Muslims, including Dr. Zakir Hussain, Vice- Chancellor, Aligarh Muslim University, and Sultan Ahmed, Nawab of Chattari, submitted a detailed memorandum to Dr. Frank Graham, the U.N.'s Kashmir Representative, setting forth step-by-step how the Muslim League, and Pakistan, had been letting down Indians of the faith, while professing all the time to ``protect the interests of Muslims in Kashmir and India.'' The memorandum said Pakistan's policy towards Kashmir was fraught with the gravest peril to the 40 million Muslims of free India.

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