Pubdate: Wed, 10 Jun 1998
Source: The Record (Kitchener-Waterloo) 
Contact:  http://www.southam.com/kitchenerwaterloorecord/

DRUG RAID WAS SETUP, HEIRESS SAYS

NEW YORK -- Claims that Patty Hearst Shaw, the heiress kidnapped by
terrorists in 1974, was set up for a federal drugs raid earlier this year
are being investigated by U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno.

A package containing drugs and bearing a San Diego postmark was delivered to
the sprawling, mock-Tudor home of Patricia Hearst Shaw, 44, in Wilton, Conn.
in February.

Fearing that the parcel was a bomb, she phoned the police.

Minutes later, however, agents from the federal Drug Enforcement Agency
(DEA) arrived at her front door.

They told her they were acting on a tip-off and said the parcel contained
narcotics.

She told this week's New Yorker magazine that they were ready to arrest her
for accepting delivery of the package.

But because she had not taken the parcel into her home and had already
called the local police, the agents said no charges would be laid and that
she had done "everything right."

Now her lawyer, George Martinez, has demanded that the Attorney General hold
an inqury, particularly as Shaw is petitioning Bill Clinton for a
presidential pardon for her role in a bank raid in which, she says, her
captors forced her to take part. She was imprisoned for her role in the
armed raid.

Shaw said she called the police only because of her experience with the
group that kidnapped her, the self-styled revolutionaries of the Symbiones
Liberation Army.

"I always look my mail over because of having spent 18 months with
terrorists who thought up things like this.

"They would sit around and dream up ways to kill people."

A spokesman for the Justice Department said that Reno had now ordered a
"detailed and expeditious" investigation.

Shaw, the heiress to the publishing fortune created by her grandfather,
William Randolph Hearst, said: "I don't know who sent the parcel but it had
to be someone with access to large amounts of narcotics who doesn't have to
pay for them."

Now married to Bernard Shaw, her former bodyguard, and the mother of two
daughters, aged 16 and 12. Shaw was arrested by the Federal Bureau of
Investigation in December 19975, and was sentanced the following year to
seven years in prison for taking part in the terrorists' bank robbery.

However, in January 1979, President Jimmy Carter commuted her sentance and
was released within three days.

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Checked-by: Melodi Cornett