C. OGLE Department of Mathematics, Ohio State University, Columbus, 0H43210, U.S.A. (Received: March 1992) Abstraet. Following Connes and Moscovici, we show that the Baum-Connes assembly map for K,(C~*n) is rationally injective when n is word-hyperbolic, implying the Equivariant Novikov conjecture for such groups. Using this result in topological K-theory and BoreI-Karoubi regulators, we also s...