Thank you guys... really appreciate the concerns...

to Denis - this confused me as well... I can't call myself a mechanic but was around the cars since my grandma's '68 "moskvich 408" and i remember that once the car was running, you could take off battery terminal (klemma) and the car continued to run, off the alternator juice. it would not restart, once shut off, but would not shut off... this is the strange thing that i was talking about in the original post... the master kill switch cuts off the negative battery cable... maybe the alternator's negative lead is not grounded to the rest of the car but ran directly to the battery? not sure how this can be done in this particular application... strange indeed...

Patrick - in your case i would still check the cables in the trunk, not just the battery cables but also to see how tight the connections on the master fuses on the back wall of the trunk cavity and make sure that the nuts on the ground cables are tight too... from my experience/experiment it is evident, that the car may have a tendency to shut off (or just a hiccup) if the master power is disrupted...