Please supply the date and source confirmation of an incident
(sometime around 1996, I believe) when a tourist on a Circle Line
pleasure cruise around Manhattan was shot by a sniper from the shore.
Please supply newspaper commentary of the incident if available.

Hello.

The incident happened on September 12, 1994. German tourist Rolf
Bolowski was shot in the back as he sat on the upper deck of a Circle
Line sightseeing boat near the Harlem River Shore. His injuries
required medical attention but were not life-threatening.

I couldn't find a publicly-available description of the incident on
the web, but I was able to track down some articles in an a commercial
database.

Here's an excerpt from USA Today: 

"TOURIST SHOT: Rolf Bolowski, 31, of Hamburg, Germany, was shot in the
back as he toured New York's Harlem River on a Circle Line boat. He's
in stable condition. Police said the shot came from shore. Police had
no immediate motive and no one was arrested. It was the first such
incident in the 49-year history of the popular tourist attraction. To
underscore the city's concern for tourist safety, Mayor Rudolph
Giuliani visited Bolowski in his hospital room."
Almanac, USA Today; Sep 13, 1994; Paul Leavitt; Margaret L. Usdansky

Here are some excerpts from Associated Press:

"A German tourist aboard a Circle Line sightseeing boat was shot in
the back Monday by a bullet apparently fired from the Harlem River
shore, police said. The victim wasn't seriously wounded.

Police, unsure which shore the shot came from, searched for the
shooter in the Bronx and the Washington Heights section of northern
Manhattan. Detective Joseph McConville also said it wasn't clear
whether the bullet was a stray or was fired at the boat intentionally.

Rolf Bolowski, 31, a postal worker from Hamburg, Germany, was shot at
about 1:30 p.m. as he sat with his wife on the upper deck of the boat
while it plied the Harlem River, which connects the Hudson and East
rivers at the northern edge of Manhattan. There were more than 300
people aboard...

Bolowski was taken to Lincoln Hospital in the Bronx; he was in stable
condition and being held for observation."
From: BULLET HITS GERMAN TOURIST ABOARD CIRCLE LINE CRUISE 
The Record; Bergen County, N.J.; Sep 13, 1994; The Associated Press


If you have any more questions about the incident, let me know. If you
want full-text articles, you could get them for $3 each from
Lexis-Nexis by credit card http://www.lexisnexis.com . After
registering, just run a news search for "rolf bolowski." They should
have at least three dozen articles about the incident, but most of
them probably say more or less the same thing.

search strategy: "circle line," tourist, shot

I hope this helps.

Perfect -just what I wanted.

The reason for asking is that Toby Young's new bestseller, "How to
Lose Friends and Alienate People" contains an incident in which Toby
claims that when he was on the Circle Line in July 1995, a German
tourist named Klaus was felled by a "rumored" sniper. Toby's account
in an otherwise good book had the stench of extreme "authorial
license" as it was very unlikely that he was on the same boat for such
a freak incident, and so I wanted some documentary evidence of the
actual date to send to him/ his publisher for a correction. Thanks for
your help.

What kind of bullet was used in this sniper incident?

-omniscientbeing-ga