Tuesday, March 24, 2015

The immigrant who hated it so much here that he bombed our embassy

 Not all immigrants enjoy Canada. An untold number move back to their country or elsewhere after arriving.
  But surely no immigrant hated Canada as much as Colman Losonczy, a mechanic-turned accountant who hated Canada so much that he attempted to renounce his citizenship and then committed a murderous anti-Canadian terrorist act when that failed.
   Losonczky moved to Montreal from Hungary in 1951 at age 29.
   He met secretary Lucille Bastien five years later and the two spent romantic time in Paris. They appeared to have lived at 10800 Berri in Ahuntsic but they split in 1962 and she filed for divorce in October 1968.
Vienna embassy
   "I left him because I was fed up with supporting him. I begged him to assume his duties as a husband and he failed to do so I left," she said.
   Losonczy had been forced to serve in the Wehrmacht as a teen, an experience that left him deeply scarred.
  Once in Canada he got an idea that French Canadians were oppressed, so he decided to help them fight against the oppressor. He took part in the 1968 St. Jean Baptiste riots in Montreal.
  Losonczy was not - as far as we know - involved in the centre of the Quebec separatist movement but he was surely sympathetic to it and inspired by it. It's unknown whether he was acquainted with fellow Magyar Francois Schirm who killed for the FLQ after coming to Montreal from Hungary.
  In 1967 he went to the Canadian embassy in Vienna and attempted to renounce his Canadian citizenship. He caused a scene and was deported back to Canada.
  On August 26, 1969 Losonczy, then 47, returned to that embassy and set it on fire with incendiary devices.
   Dead in the blaze was senior commercial officer Hans Karl Rott, 47 and delivery man Alfred Sautner, 46,
 Anywhere from 15 to 32 others suffered various injuries, broken limbs, burns, cuts and shock. One brave employee caught one of the bombs and ran down the stairs with it. Another employee was hit by the mad attacker as he ran for a fire extinguisher.
   He surrendered himself to police at the scene.
   He had written a letter to the government calling them "miserable capitalist criminals, arrogant oppressor-exploiters, stinking prostitutes and degenerate satellites of the imperialist Yankee murderers... I escape from Canad that ___ English colony where I refuse to live in destitution and misery." He also tossed in an anti-Semitic insult for good measure.
   Losonczy hanged himself in jail while awaiting trial in March 1970. 

1 comment:

  1. Very sad. The 2 men who died will be remebered at a Memorial Wall in Ottawa in 2019.

    ReplyDelete

Love to get comments! Please, please, please speak your mind !
Links welcome - please google "how to embed a link" it'll make your comment much more fun and clickable.