EXILED SULTAN OF MOROCCO

Press, Volume LXXXIX, Issue 27132, 31 August 1953, Page 9

EXILED SULTAN OF MOROCCO

French Fear Kidnap Plot In Corsica (Rec. 8 p.m.) LONDON, August 29. The former Sultan of Morocco, who is now in exile in Corsica, is expected to be moved to more secure surroundings in the next few days to foil a suspected Arab League plot to kidnap him and take him to Cairo, says the Paris correspondent of the “Daily Express.” « The armed guard around the Ajaccio Prefecture has been reinforced by two lorry-loads of military police with rifles —about 50 men.

Apart from their own information, the French are basing their precautions on the knowledge that if the Sultan was free to carry on agitation from Cairo, he would be a valuable pawn in the Arab-Asiatic bloc’s Nationalist campaign against the French in Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco. He could also continue to organise his Arab followers in Spanish Morocco and Tangier (for whom he is still the legal spiritual and temporal ruler of Moroccan Islams).

The Egyptians—the leaders of the Arab-Asiatic bloc—have been training commando squads under former Nazis such as Otto Skorzeny, the paratrooper who snatched Mussolini from the Allies in the Italian mountains. French fears of such a “snatch” are expected to' mean a swift change of address for the Sultan and his family to a more defensible residence deep inside the rugged mountain countryside of Corsica.

The French authorities say they hope to get him out of Corsica, probably to* somewhere on the French mainland, within a month.