ALLEGED PLOT IN PRAGUE

Press, Volume LXXXIV, Issue 25610, 27 September 1948, Page 7

ALLEGED PLOT IN PRAGUE

AMERICA ACCUSED OF COMPLICITY

AUTHORITIES ANNOUNCE ARRESTS (N.Z. Press Association —Copyright)

(Rec- 8 p.m.) PRAGUE, Sept. 25. It is announced, that a plot to blow up the Czechoslovak Parliament has been discovered in Prague, that a number of persons have been sentenced to gaol on espionage and other charges, and that security police in Bohemia have arrested Joseph Koch, alleged to be a spy for the American counter-intelligence service, in connexion with the plot to blow up the Czechoslovak Parliament. It is aliteged that two American counter-intelligence officers named Lloyd and Wasser-Alfingen, with a former Czechoslovak Socialist member of Parliament, instructed Koch to prepare a bomb attack on the Parliament buildings while all members and ministers were present. Koch is said to have arrived in Czechoslovakia in April to deliver a large sealed envelope to an unnamed embassy. The announcement also disclosed other arrests. They include a Czech subject working in a Prague embassy. A Prague court has sentenced two sisters, Anna and Margareta Cibulkova, to 18 and 10 years’ imprisonment, and Leo Vlasak to. 15 years’ imprisonment for espionage bn behalf of the American counter-intelligence service. A Dominican monk, 34-year-old Antonin Zemek, was sentenced to 18 yeafs’ imprisonment for organising escapes over the Austrian border and giving away Czechoslovak secrets. A salesman, Frantisek Skrabek, was also sentenced to 18 years’ imprisonment, and eight others received terms ranging from two to 15 years’ imprisonment on charges of complicity with Zemek in hiding refugees at the Znojmo monastery before crossing the frontier. The police have arrested 18 students who were members of Dr. Benes’s National Socialist Party on suspicion of complicity in preparations for an armed uprising during the election in February this year. The students are alleged to have been in touch with the American counter-intelligence service and to have organised escapes from Czechoslovakia and carried on espionage.

In, Frankfurt to-day a United States Army spokesman said that the Czechoslovak charges against the American intelligence Corps in Germany were a fabrication. Tne spokesman declined to say anything more.