FORMER MODEL’S CAR FOUND

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31276, 24 January 1967, Page 13

FORMER MODEL’S CAR FOUND

(N.Z. Press Association—Copyright) NGOC AN (Vietnam), January 23. Soldiers have found the car of the missing French freelance journalist and former model, Michele Ray, who is believed in the hands of the Viet Cong.

Her car, a white Renault Dauphine, with the French Tricolor painted on both ends, was found in a small grove of sugar cane. The Viet Cong had done a good job of hiding it Mud was smeared over the licence plates, sugar cane was piled on the roof, making it invisible from aerial search, and an old artillery shell was hidden under the car, ready to explode. Miss Ray. who drove through this coastal plain last Tuesday in what her parents believe may have been a deliberate attempt to contact the Viet Cong to

cover “the other side of the war” was nowhere to be seen. \

The villagers of Ngoc An were uncommunicative until a Vietnamese soldier broke a stick across the back of one of them. This villager then led the troops to the car.

Other villagers began recalling when they last saw Miss Ray. Rounded up by infantrymen of the Vietnamese 40th Regiment from the paddyfields and sugar cane groves, and dug out of tunnels and holes, they seemed to agree that she was still in the locality in the hands of guerrillas, possibly hidden in a tunnel.