Surgery on knots in solid tori (Q1124171)

\textit{R. A. Litherland} [Proc. Lond. Math. Soc., III. Ser 39, 130-146 (1979; Zbl 0418.57002)] has shown that non-trivial surgeries along a sufficiently complicated sattelite knot will never yield a homotopy sphere. In the paper under review it is demonstrated how the author's sutured manifold theory can be exploited for this problem to give a different proof of the previous result which also works for all remaining cases. In fact, it is shown that surgery along a curve in the solid torus yields an (\(\partial -)\) irreducible 3-manifold or a non-trivial connected sum, unless the knot is of a special type (completely analyzed in a yet unpublished paper by Berge).