BERN, Switzerland -- The four gunmen who seized the Polish Embassy and threatened to blow it up along with their hostages had no explosives, Swiss officials said today.
But the terrorists, who were led by a man revealed to be a convicted Polish spy, did possess four U.S. made Remington 870 repeating rifles, four bayonets and gas masks, authorities said.
The terrorists tried to cross the Austrian border from West Germany Aug. 30 but were turned back, a Justice Ministry official said.
They entered Switzerland the next day and stayed in a Zurich hotel until Monday when they forced their way into the Polish Embassy in Bern and threatened to blow themselves and 12 hostages up unless martial law was lifted within 48 hours.
In Warsaw, Polish embassy officials freed by the Swiss police said the gunmen threatened to execute the embassy's military attache 'as the representative of Gen. Wojciech Jaruzelski's regime,' a report on Polish radio said.
Swiss officials refused Polish requests for extradition of the gunmen Thursday. Under Swiss law the terrorists can receive a maximum of 10 years in prison.
Swiss Justice Minister Kurt Furgler said the four gunmen might 'prefer being in Switzerland than in some countries where freedom does not have the same value.
'But they will be brought to court, they will be punished. Our penal law never exempts this kind of crime.'
Authorities revealed Thursday that the leader of the terrorists, Florian Kruszyk, 42, had been convicted by Austria of spying for Poland in 1968. He also served most of a nine-year prison sentence for the 1969 armed robbery of a Viennese jewelry shop during which he held the jeweller's family hostage.
The other gunmen were identified as Marek Michalski, 20, Miroslaw Plewinski, 23 and Krysztof Wasilewski, 33. Authorities said all were Poles but had little further information about them.
Red-bereted police commandos charged into the embassy in the Swiss capital under a hail of stun grenades and tear gas to rescue the five remaining hostages and capture four gunmen. They first blew open the door with a remote-controlled device hidden in a food package.
The operation was carried out with clockwork precision, took only 12 minutes and no one was injured. However, some of the hostages told Polish journalists the gunmen, who demanded an end to martial law in Poland, beat them and threatened them with execution during their captivity.
At a press conference at the end of the 72-hour siege, Furgler saidSwitzerland would not satisfy an extradition request and noted that Poland was not part of a Western European agreement on the prosecution of terrorists.
He said Kruszyk, was a 'fanatic driven by political desires' who could not be equated with the cause of the suspended Polish union Solidarity.
Poland's martial law government, which offered to send its own commando unit to Bern to end the siege, said after the hostages were freed it wanted to extradite the gunmen if they were Polish.
The Warsaw regime, under pressure following demonstrations marking the second anniversary of the Solidarity, tried to attribute the embassy takeover to extreme elements within the union's ranks.
Further mystery was cast on Kruszyk's identity and motivation by an 80-year-old Polish-born priest who said that during hostage negotiations Kruszyk condemned Solidarity activists as 'traitors.'
An ey-Polish military man, Kruszyk, 42, called himself Col. Wysocki after a popular resistance leader.
Kruszyk arrived in Austria in 1967 as an alleged political refugee from Poland but was soon detected by police as a member of the Polish secret service.
Kruszyk was refused asylum in Switzerland in 1978 after the prison term in Austria. He went to the Netherlands where some reports say he was involved in a terror campaign against Polish diplomatic institutions in The Hague.
Austrian security officials said it can not be excluded that Kruszyk, who repeatedly admitted his espionage activities, still cooperates with the Polish secret service.
Eight hostages were released before the embassy was stormed -- a student, an ill diplomat and six women. Police also rescued an attache who was trapped in the compound during the siege and whose presence was never detected by the gunmen
