Fugitive Indian Activist Wanted on 14 Kidnaping Charges Arrested

Fugitive Indian activist Eddie Hatcher, wanted on 14 kidnaping charges in North Carolina, was arrested by the FBI on Friday after failing to persuade officials at the Soviet consulate to grant him political asylum.

Hatcher was inside the consulate for several hours, until he was escorted out the gate by Soviet officials and taken into custody by waiting FBI agents.

While in the consulate, he sent out a statement, handwritten on a sheet of yellow legal paper, claiming that officials in the federal government and in North Carolina were trying to destroy him.

Hatcher, 31, and Timothy Jacobs, 20, held about 20 people hostage in the offices of The Robesonian newspaper in North Carolina on Feb. 1, 1988. The two Tuscarora Indians said they took over the newspaper to draw attention to their claims of law enforcement involvement in drug trafficking and official corruption.

The 10-hour siege ended when Gov. Jim Martin agreed to form a state task force to investigate their charges. The task force, in its report, found no evidence to support the claims, and Martin later said they were based on “rumor and gossip.”

“The state of N.C. and the government of the United States has made every vindictive attempt to destroy my life, my family and my people. They will not cease until they have accomplished this,” Hatcher’s statement read.

“I see no hope in the American government, nor do I see fairness.”

A federal jury last October acquitted both men on federal hostage-taking and firearms charges after a three-week trial.

But the Robeson County grand jury in December indicted the two Indians on the kidnaping charges. Hatcher was arrested in Pembroke, N.C., but Jacobs fled the state and sought sanctuary at the Onondaga Indian Reservation near Syracuse, N.Y.

Fled to Reservation

Hatcher fled to the same reservation after his $25,000 bond was posted by the National Council of Churches. He later left New York and sought refuge on the Ft. Hall Reservation in Idaho. He disappeared from that reservation several weeks ago after being taken under tribal custody.

Jacobs was arrested in New York after leaving the reservation, and a state judge is considering whether he should be extradited to North Carolina to face the kidnaping charges.

Both men have claimed that their lives would be in jeopardy if they return to Robeson County.

Earlier, in a telephone call from the consulate to the Associated Press bureau in Raleigh, N.C., Hatcher said: “The people in the United States are always crying about human rights violations in the Soviet Union. I want them to know about the human rights violations in this country against the Indians and the poor.”

Hatcher’s attorney, New York civil rights lawyer William Kunstler, said before the Soviets yielded Hatcher to U.S. authorities: “If they will give him sanctuary there, it’s a bit of foreign soil and therefore, no gendarmes from federal or state agencies can get in there.”

“American consulates are done this way frequently,” he said. “If they can keep him there, it would save him from immediate arrest. What’s worrying him is that he won’t survive inside Robeson County. His bail restricts him to Robeson County and that makes him very vulnerable.”