The Coroner's inquest on the bodies of the two men
who met their death in Sidney Street opened on Friday week. Mr. Bodkin, for the Treasury, having defended the calling in of the Scots Guards on the ground that the police were not adequately armed and that the situation was " wholly exceptional and terribly dangerous," Superintendent Mulvaney described the events of the siege from the police raid to the destruction of the house by fire. Dr. Grant, the police surgeon of the H Division, expressed his opinion that one of the men had died from a bullet wound in the head which was not self-inflicted, and that the other had died of suffocation. Evidence was also given as to the finding of the two bodies and two magazine pistols by the firemen. On Monday Mrs. Gershon, a dressmaker, in whose room the two men had taken refuge, described how they came to be there. On the Sunday night one of the men, whom she had known for two years as Josef, and who was a friend of her husband now in Russia, brought a friend and stayed for two hours. On the following night they came again, refused to go away at midnight, and obliged her to go into the back room, whence she was summoned by the landlady, Mrs. Fleischman. She described the appearance of the two men, and stated that Josef walked with a limp.
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