The Philadelphia Inquirer from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania • Page 13

Tuesday, Aug. 26, 1986 The Philadelphia Inquirer 13-A Police thwart Nicaraguans' asylum bid, U.S. aide says Fernandez told a reporter, quoting five embassy employees who he said had witnessed the incident. He said the policeman and two unidentified men "jumped on the man and forcibly pulled him off. He even tried to hold on with his foot" The man and his wife sobbed when their efforts failed, Fernandez said.

A police wagon arrived and took the family away. "It was pretty awful I see very little we will be able to do," Fernandez said. With the man and woman were five or six of their children, all under 10 years old and including an infant Fernandez said the family looked "very, very poor." Fernandez said he believed it to be the only such incident this year. Nicaraguan police constantly patrol the perimeter of the embassy, but it was not clear whether there were any VS. guards outside the building when the incident took place.

Also yesterday, a clergyman said that about 60 men who appeared to be supporters of the ruling leftist Sandinista Front which is fighting a civil war against guerrillas known as contras, had attacked and damaged his recently built Path of Light Assembly of God Church. The attack took place late Sunday night around midnight according to the pastor, the Rev. Juan Caldera Rodriguez. He said that some of the attackers were armed with machetes, pistols and bayonets and that they broke apart a few wooden benches and pulled the church's tin roof to the ground. The pastor and a small group of church members and townspeople said the men shouted, "Death to CIA agents," "Death to Christianity," and "Long live the front," apparently referring to the Sandinista Front.

He said one church member was struck in the head by rocks and hospitalized. The witnesses said they recognized the leader of the attackers as a representative of the local Sandinista Defense Committee. The committees are neighborhood groups set up by the government for vigilance and party organization. No comment from the committee was immediately available. The pastor said the attackers accused him of getting money from the CIA to build the church.

Reporters yesterday visited the site of the church, about four miles MANAGUA, Nicaragua A Nicara-guan man and his wife and children tried to enter the VS. Embassy to seek asylum yesterday, but were hauled away by police, an embassy spokesman said. The man, calling for help and shouting that his life was in danger, "threw himself onto the embassy gate and held on" before a policeman and two men in civilian clothes pulled him away, embassy spokesman Alberto Fernandez said. "He said his home had been taken, be had nothing to eat and he wanted asylum and help from the embassy," north of downtown Managua. A wooden frame was left standing above the felled roof.

They cut off the electricity and in the dark dismantled everything," the pastor said. He said Sandinista Defense Committee members were hostile toward the church because it was attracting so many supporters. He said the congregation was formed seven months ago and had grown to about 60 members. In the past militant supporters of the leftist government have been reported disrupting church services and destroying church property. Soviets modifying half of reactors like Chernobyl's "ii iiiiiir i mi in CtT HT r.

v-V it A Mntmmtm-1 Tfti ir-mih itoT WiMWiffaiiiiwiiJiii ii i mi wu hi 't iffiMmwfliwariiHF By Jenny Waller VIENNA, Austria The Soviet Union acknowledged for the first time yesterday that about half of its atomic reactors similar to the one at Chernobyl had been shut down for modifications. The statement was made by the leader of the Soviet delegation to an international meeting to examine the incident He did not say how many reactors were involved, but an annex to a formal Soviet report on the Chernobyl nuclear disaster indicated that 18 reactors of the Chernobyl design existed in the Soviet Union, including the damaged reactor. "About half of them are in a shutdown position to carry out the measures proposed in order to increase their safety," Valery A. Legasov told reporters, after making a five-hour presentation to more than 500 nuclear power experts from more than 50 countries at a meeting of the International Atomic Energy Agency here. Legasov also called the April 26 accident which killed 31 people and sent radioactive debris around the globe, "a disaster for our citizens." But he added that Soviet experts were sure that even an accident like Chernobyl could not stop the further use of nuclear energy.

"We hope that the medical and radiological experts will find this information presented at the meeting helpful to clarify the possible medical consequences of an accident at a nuclear power plant," he said. The Soviet experts were interested in a "very correct and professional" discussion, he added. Next month, the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Hans Blix, will report conclusions of the five-day meeting to the agency's directors. The agency, which is strengthening its requirements on reporting reactor accidents, is the U.N. body charged with promoting peaceful uses of nuclear power and making sure that fuel is not used to make arms.

The Soviets came under heavy criticism for providing tardy and incomplete information on Chernobyl, but they have supported the new system of international reporting. The Soviets previously had denied that any reactors similar to the one at Chernobyl had been shut down because of the disaster. The 382-page Soviet report put heavy blame on human error rather than faulty equipment. Pressed by reporters, Legasov said: "The defect of the system was that the designers did not foresee the awkward and silly actions by the operators." The disaster injured hundreds, forced the evacuation of 135,000 people and caused $2.8 billion in damage. The report presented yesterday catalogued a string of procedural errors by workers at the No.4 reactor at the Chernobyl power plant It said the reactor was brought down to low power on April 25 during a routine shutdown and a planned test of how long one of the generators it supplied with power would keep going if its steam supply were cut off.

The test was designed to improve safety in the reactor, the report said. The report said a key mistake was made when reactor personnel allowed the reactor to keep running even though the emergency cooling system had been shut down. The document said a further error was continuing the experiment even though the reactor was allowed to fall below 30 megawatts of output before being "stabilized" at 200 megawatts. IN JAKARTA, Philippine President Corazon Aquino (left) the Merdeka palace, was on the first stop of a "journey of meets with Indonesia President Suharto. Aquino, who arrived brotherhood" to promote close relations with her country's for a two-day visit Sunday and met with Suharto yesterday at neighbors.

At center are interpreters. Don't call us India's phone mess makes politician fly off handle For sale: Channel 29? Taf seeks a price tag in the absence of bribes, and phones that seem to be dead about as often as they are not. Frustrated subscribers have been known to smash telephones. Reuters news service asserts that at normal times, calls booked through the Indian system have one chance in four of reaching the right number. "The level of inefficiency, callousness and simple insolence in the telephone exchanges would drive anyone mad," the Hindustan Times editorialized yesterday.

But the strike was an embarrassment. Over the weekend, police and soldiers got involved. Army signal corps engineers worked without pause to repair equipment The operators remained inside the downtown exchange, dropping notes from the ninth floor complaining that they were locked in and unable to eat or go to the toilet because they refused to work. Outside, their husbands and boyfriends waited. After 2Vi days, on Sunday night, the government announced that Sethi had apologized and that the strike was over, but many strikers denied it and so did Sethi.

Sethi said the goverment had fabricated a letter over his signature. The protest subsided yesterday. Almost all telephone operators were back at work. The country's telephone system was back to normal for India. Sethi, waving a cordless Japanese telephone, told reporters, "In India, you just cannot get a call through." They said a male shop steward interceded, but the 65-year-old Sethi roughed him up and tore his clothes, then collapsed on the floor for 30 minutes.

Kiran bolted the exit door to keep him there until police arrived. "I'll jump from the ninth floor and die, but I will have justice," she told reporters. Police charged Sethi with trespassing, disturbing the peace, using filthy and abusive language and assaulting a public servant on duty. He was not arrested. According to Sethi, when he arrived on the ninth floor, operators surrounded him and wouldn't let him go.

Then, he says, the shop steward knocked him out. He got home at 3:30 a.m. Saturday, and he says a doctor certified that he was not drunk. About 4,000 operators and staff members immediately disputed Sethi's account. By dawn Friday they launched a strike, demanding his arrest.

Domestic and overseas bookings were paralyzed. Some emergency police numbers were out of service. Other services were crippled. Operators sat atop switchboards, twisted their headsets apart and shouted, "Death to Sethi!" Still, Sethi's fury struck a responsive chord in the Indian public. India's government-owned telephone system is notorious for inefficiency, rude operators, equipment that is obsolete, incorrect billings, repairs that are inexplicably delayed By Victoria Graham NEW DELHI, India This is a true story about modern India.

The villain is the telephone, taken for granted in much of the world, but in India regarded as an instrument of torture. The leading man is a former cabi net, minister, a powerful politician who has defied Sikh death threats, but a man humbled by the telephone and a call that wouldn't go through, even at gunpoint. The leading lady role is shared by hundreds of sari-clad telephone op erators, working for low wages in the downtown New Delhi exchange. The politican described the opera tors as "fat, lazy gossips, drinking tea in a lousy telephone system, the worst in the world." The operators compared themselves to Kali, the Hindu goddess of destruction, and went on a three-day wildcat strike, smashing switchboards, crippling service and demanding that the politician be jailed or held as insane. The drama has not been played out, but this is how it began: On Thursday, Prakash Chand Sethi, a member of Parliament who fras formerly India home minister, tried for four hours and 20 minutes and made five pleas to an operator to get a top priority "lightning" call to Bombay from his home.

At 12:50 a.m. on Friday, he decided enough was enough. He warned the operator he was on his way to her office and set off with his son-in-law and three armed body guards. The bodyguards had been assigned to him because his life had been threatened by Sikh extremists; Sethi had been in charge of domestic security when the army attacked the Sikhs' Golden Temple in June 1984, and several people associated with that attack have since been assassinated. Sethi took his Czechoslovak-made, licensed revolver, explaining later that security rules "require me to hold onto my gun." The midnight raiders headed for Kidwai Bhavan, the telephone exchange office in downtown New Delhi, the capital's nerve center.

Brushing past guards, they stormed to the ninth floor and demanded to see the offending operator, identified as Kiran. "I am a public man with a grouse," he said afterward. "This place should be thrown open to citizens so they can see what a mess the telephone system is." Then accounts differ. Kiran said she peeked from the women's rest room and saw a man in a white pajama suit drunk, staggering, swaggering and abusive advancing with three guards toward the switchboard. She said she came out and he grabbed her arms, waving his revolver and blowing cigar smoke into her face.

"Do you know who I am? Do you want to live in this world?" witnesses quoted Sethi as saying. "I can buy girls like you for five rupees 40 centsl." would happen," she said, "and now that it is here, I am more sad than happy because of all those I leave behind." Such celebrity events are rare in Moscow, so the airport was crowded with reporters. Foreign film crews were on hand to record the ultimate wave, the final kisses, the muttered goodbyes. Little Boris grabbed a microphone that had been thrust his way and inadvertently became a photo opportunity. A man from a different kind of network videotaped those leaving and those staying, because among the latter were some of the stars of the Soviet dissident movement.

They had braved the scrutiny of what ap WTAF-TV, from 1-A ing firm. Now is a good time to sell a television station, said Elizabeth A. Toth, an industry analyst and vice president of Provident National Bank. "I think they're at a plateau in price, if not a peak," Toth said. Taft stressed, however, that a sale of the stations is not definite.

"I want to emphasize that we've made no final decision regarding our independent stations," Taft chairman Charles S. Mechem Jr. said. However, Taft must raise some cash to handle the massive debt it took on last year to buy the broadcast properties of Gulf Broadcast said Jonathan A. Intrater, vice president of Broadcast Investment Analysts.

In its latest fiscal year, ended March 31, Taft reported net income of $19.42 million, down from $48.48 million in fiscal 1985. In the fourth quarter, the company showed a loss of $13.79 million, compared with net income of $6.03 million in the same quarter a year earlier. Much of the plunge in earnings came from the debt the company took on in the Gulf purchase. In fiscal 1986, the company's interest expense totaled $61 million, nearly five times the interest expense the year before. Outside investors also have increased their pressure on Taft management.

Last week, an investment group led by Robert M. Bass of Fort Worth, Texas, announced that it had increased its holdings of Taft common stock. The Bass group now owns 18.3 percent, or about $200 million Reunited, Shcharansky worth, of the outstanding stock. Taft officials yesterday would not go beyond the brief statement announcing that Goldman Sachs would set a price for the five stations. Besides owning WTAF, Taft also holds a 47.5 percent share in the Phillies, but Taft did not indicate that it planned to sell the team.

At Channel 17, the search for a buyer continues, Jack C. Clifford, vice president of broadcasting and cable television for its owner, the Providence Journal Co. of Providence, R.I., said yesterday. "We've had a lot of interest, and people are looking at it," he said. Some potential buyers are touring the station this week, he added.

Broadcast Investment Analysts had estimated that Channel 17 could sell for $65 million to $70 million. But Clifford, who said he was surprised by the amount of interest in the station, said some preliminary bids have been higher. Providence Journal, which publishes the Providence Journal and Bulletin newspapers, paid $15 million for Channel 17 in 1978, Clifford said. Taft paid an estimated $4.5 million for Channel 29 in 1969. Besides WTAF, Taft also reported it might sell KTXA-TV, Arlington-Dallas, Texas; KTXH-TV, Houston; WCDC-TV, Miami, and WDCA-TV, Washington.

Taft's independent stations typically are not as profitable as other independents, Intrater said. "They spend a lot to do well, but as a result they're not pulling in the cash flow they should, given their shares." 24 18 16 all behind "Perhaps it is a lucky token," said the friend, who has himself been waiting to leave for eight years. Some last waves. More tears. The crowd yelled "shalom." Another man, named Lev, looked away as the figures disappeared through passport control.

"He Leonid gave me a promise to see my family in New York and New Jersey," he said. "They left 11 years ago. I applied to leave 12 years ago. "It's the usual situation. If someone leaves, they are very lucky.

But they feel guilty because they leave us here. We hope sometime to see them again. But for now it is a hole in our lives." closely watched by heavily armed Austrian security guards who are routinely deployed around the El Al planes. It was the first time Milgrom had seen her younger son since January 1985. "I saw him then in prison.

He was not free," she told reporters in Vienna as she wiped tears from her eyes. Leonid Shcharansky told reporters in Vienna, "I am very, very tired after the last few days in the Soviet Union. There are so many correspondents here. It is difficult to face again. 1 am not a movie star." amily leaves peared to be the KGB for a chance to bid some lucky ones goodbye.

After nearly an hour, the family cleared customs, but only after they had been told that they had to leave behind a teapot, two aperitif glasses, a woman's watch with a gold band, a little vase and some silver spoons. No reason was given. At the last moment, Leonid came back to the customs barrier and handed a friend a small green envelope. Was it rubles, perhaps? It is illegal to carry them out of the Soviet Union. No, it was a Swiss army knife, which had been used to cut string for tying up luggage the night before.

and flew yesterday to Vienna, Austria, where Anatoly Shcharansky met them and accompanied them to Israel. Anatoly had asked Austrian security officials to keep reporters away. The family met privately, in a secure room at the airport, and then all were driven by minibus to the steps of a waiting scheduled El Al flight to Israel. Anatoly climbed the airplane steps with his arm around his mother's shoulders and kissed her on the forehead before ducking into the blue and white Boeing 737. They were it Share of the Philadelphia TV audience From July 10 to Aug.

6, 7 a.m. to 1 a.m. FAMILY, from 1-A celebrated brother. He was thrust into the fight for Anatoly, but he himself never sought to leave or even to challenge the, system. Until the day of his brotner ar rest in 1977, he was a successful computer engineer, an "assimilated Jew" in his phrase, content to make tne best of it in the only society he knew.

I never thought of leaving, he said the other day. "I had lots of blat connections and lots of friends. Why would I want to go?" As his advocacy of his brother's plight increased, his blat evaporated and he was fired from his job in 1982. "I understood that for my family, for my son, it would be better to leave this country because of my name." Now Leonid is faced with an uncer tain future. He is unconvinced about resettling in Israel and yesterday, as ne stood at the airport with his wite, Raya, and sons.

Alexander, 14, and Boris, 1, he sidestepped questions about where he might live. "Mv desire iust now is to have a little rest," he said. "I'm very tired for all the nine years, the last five years, especially." Alexander, known as Sasha, said he had the feeling that one life was ending. "I have lots of relatives and close friends here," he said, "but I'm going to a new world." Raya, a non-Jewish Russian who turns 40 today, had great difficulty saying goodbye to her father and four sisters. "I thought that this day Shcharanskys' journey ends in Israel WPVI Channel 6ABC KYW Channel 3NBC WCAU Channel 10CBS WTAF' WPHL 6i Channel Channel 29lndependent 17lndependent WGBS 4 Channel 57lndependent Rtutin TEL AVTV The mother and brother of former Soviet dissident Anatoly Shcharansky hugged each other and wept on arrival in Israel last night after winning their struggle to be allowed to leave the Soviet Union.

i "I want to be with my children, said Ida Milgrom, Shcharansky's mothsr, as she arrived in her new homeland six months after her fa-nous son. She, her elder son, Leonid, his wife, Raya, and their two sons received Soviet exit visas last Tuesday 4 Channel 12PBS WHYY Other stations do not have a reportable share. Percentages are for households with television sets turned on. TV stations for sale SOUHCfc; A.C. Nielsen Co.

The Philadelphia InqmrerFRANK M. PONTAR' I.