OBITUARIES - Oct. 5, 1998

Jean-Pascal Delamuraz; Former Swiss President

Former Swiss President Jean-Pascal Delamuraz, 62, who made headlines by describing as “blackmail” Jewish demands for quick compensation to Holocaust survivors. The government did not give a cause of death, but Delamuraz’s poor health forced him to step down as economics minister in March. A 14-year veteran of the Cabinet, Delamuraz underwent a heart operation in 1995. Doctors removed a malignant tumor from his liver last year. Delamuraz’s blackmail remark, which stirred angry protests from international Jewish groups, was made in an interview with Swiss newspapers in December 1996, as he was finishing his one-year term in the rotating Swiss presidency. On Sunday in Zurich.

Gary Thomas Rowe Jr.; Informer Infiltrated KKK

Gary Thomas Rowe Jr., 64, an FBI informer who infiltrated the Ku Klux Klan during the 1960s and helped convict three Klansmen accused of killing a civil rights volunteer. A television crew shooting footage for a program about the FBI and the Ku Klux Klan learned of Rowe’s death last week, the New York Times reported Sunday. Rowe’s death was confirmed by Eugene Brooks, who had been his lawyer, the newspaper said. Under the federal witness protection program, Rowe had settled in Savannah, Ga., and assumed the name Thomas Neal Moore, under which he was buried. Federal authorities helped him assume a new identity in 1965 after he testified against the Klansmen accused of killing civil rights worker Viola Liuzzo, sending three people to prison for 10 years. Liuzzo was a white homemaker from Detroit shot by night-riding Klansmen while she drove demonstrators back to Selma, Ala., in 1965. Rowe, who was divorced, left five children, Brooks said. On May 25 of a heart attack in Savannah, his hometown.