Officer Guarding Witness Slain

NEW YORK — A rookie police officer guarding a witness in a narcotics case was gunned down today in what the police commissioner called “a deliberate assassination” to intimidate the witness.

Police Commissioner Benjamin Ward said he was outraged by the killing of rookie Officer Edward Byrne, 22, as he sat in a marked squad car early today outside the witness’s home in the drug-plagued south Jamaica section of Queens. Detectives have determined that two men in a tan Oldsmobile Cutlass pulled up alongside Byrne’s squad car at 3:25 a.m. outside the witness’s home. One man got out and fired at least five rounds from what Ward called “an extremely heavy-caliber weapon.”