APwi 06/30 1733 Guyana Attorney LA CROSSE, Wis. (AP) -- The knighted attorney who was

APwi 06/30 1733 Guyana Attorney


   LA  CROSSE,  Wis.  (AP)  --  The knighted attorney who was the
lawyer for cult leader Jim Jones in Guayana says 1,200 persons --
not 900 as reported in the media -- died at  Jones'  compound  in
1978.

   And  he  says 85 percent died from gunshot wounds in the back,
not from drinking Kool-Aid laced with cyanide.

   Sir Lionel Luckhoo said his information came from  the  doctor
who performed autopsies on the victims.

   In  a  speech  here  Monday night, the 73-year old lawyer from
Georgetown, Guyana, said a Full Gospel  Businessmen's  Fellowship
International  banquet  which he tried to avoid, on Nov. 7, 1978,
saved  him  from  the  "White  Night"  death  11  days  later  at
Jonestown.

   He  didn't  go  to  Jonestown  on Nov. 18, as Jones requested,
because "the Spirit told me: don't go."

   "I should have been dead," he told  La  Crosse's  Full  Gospel
chapter. "I was Jim Jones' lawyer."

   He   was   mayor  of  Georgetown  four  times  and  a  "double
ambassador'  '  to  England  for  both  Guyana  and   neighboring
Barbados.   He  is  listed in the Guinness Book of Records with a
streak of 245 successful murder trial  defenses,  in  Guyana  and
England.

   Despite  a  stroke  in  1984,  Luckhoo  devotes  his  life  to
traveling and speaking to groups  of  Christians  throughout  the
world.

   He  was  honored  at  a  banquet  June  4  in New York City by
ambassadors to the United Nations, he said.

   Luckhoo had been hired  by  Jones,  leader  of  the  ill-fated
People's  Temple,  to represent Jones in a custody battle for his
illegitimate son, John Victor Stoen.

   "I didn't know him (Jones) well," Luckhoo said after the talk.
"He was a client."

   However, Luckhoo called Jones an "atheist" and  a  "communist"
who "took over to my country 1,200 Americans."

   He said that after the Nov. 7 banquet he rejected a request by
Jones  to  be  at  the cult's commune at Jonestown when U.S. Rep.
Leo Ryan of California visited toinvestigate the People's Temple.
On Nov. 18, Ryan, three newsmen and a Temple defector were gunned
down by Jones' followers at an airstrip near Jonestown.

   Jones then ordered a "mass suicide"  the  cult  allegedly  had
been practicing for months.

   He  said Americans need to warn their children, grandchildren,
nephews and nieces about cults.

   "America is too gullible," he said. "America would accept  and
believe anything."

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