"Oh, I am not afraid. We have four big brightly polished copper guns."
A man named Grieve has an affidavit that he heard Lietch make this statement to Mrs. Weir.
In an affidavit furnished by one Bruckner it is stated that he saw a cannon on the Lusitania. He was standing on the dock in New York at the time, he avers.
The affidavits were supplied to the State Department by the German Embassy in order to support the allegation, contained in the German response to President Wilson's note of May 13, that the Lusitania was an armed vessel.
By The Associated Press.
WASHINGTON, June 2.—The four affidavits as presented to the State Department by the German Embassy alleging that guns were carried by the Lusitania are believed to constitute the evidence to which the German Government referred in its last note. Should it develop that the Foreign Office had been misinformed, German diplomatists said, an acknowledgment of the mistake would not be withheld.
These affidavits were not made public by either the embassy or the State Department, but the character of the individuals who made them and their testimony is being made the subject of a quiet investigation. Those officials who had seen the statements, however, were confident that they could not be accepted as disproving the testimony given by Inspectors whose duty it was to search for guns.
THE ARREST OF STAHL.
The following report appeared in The New York Times June 11, 1915: