Intruders Ransack WHRB

Five men ransacked WHRB's studios in the Memorial Hall basement Saturday afternoon, threatening technicians and disc jockeys and forcing the station to go off the air for about 14 hours, station officials said.

The group, four of whom were wearing ski masks, burst into the station at about 2:15 p.m. and threatened to "blow [a student's] head off," according to a Cambridge police report.

During the ensuing five-minute rampage, the intruders set off a fire extinguisher, smashed a turntable, and tipped over a vending machine and a stack of mailboxes, according to a student deejay who was in the studios at the time.

The student said the intruders were "pretty violent," but no one was seriously hurt.

"The extent of it was being shoved around," he said.

Police arrived just after the men fled, the student said.

The initial call to police indicated that the men had guns, but that turned out to be untrue, said one Harvard police officer on the scene.

"We had a report there was a gun. But there was no gun," the officer said.

After the incident, "WHRB received a call from a group, `The Cambridge Radical Group,' claiming responsibility for the [attack]," Cambridge police reported.

"That name means nothing to us," said WHRB president Jonathan R. Phillips '90. A meeting of WHRB members will be held tomorrow night to try to determine exactly what happened and why, he said.

Phillips and other station officials declined to speculate on a motive for the attack.

Cambridge and Harvard police spokespersons were not available for comment yesterday.

According to students, the man who came to the outside door was not wearing a mask and "seemed pretty normal." The first man then held the door as the four masked men stormed inside, they said.

The deejay said that the men appeared to have no desire to steal any of the station's equipment. "It's not like a robbery, per se. They can't really classify it as that," he said.

WHRB's broadcast of the Harvard-Brown football game was interrupted for about six seconds as a result of the brawl, he said.

Phillips said the station signed off when the football game ended at about 4 p.m. Saturday and returned to the air at about 6 a.m. yesterday.

According to the police report, suspects in the rampage are being sought on charges of assault and battery, threats and malicious destruction of private property.

Phillips estimated the cost of the damage at "a couple hundred dollars."