Vanishing structure set of Haken 3-manifolds

In this article we prove that the surgery groups of the fundamental group o f a certain class of Haken 3-manifolds can be computed in terms of a genera lized homology theory even if the manifolds do not support any nonpositivel y curved Riemannian metric. A consequence of this result is that the integr al Novikov conjecture is true for the fundamental group of this class of ma nifolds.