Govt Opponents Freed In Saigon

Press, Volume CVIII, Issue 31654, 15 April 1968, Page 9

Govt Opponents Freed In Saigon

(N.Z.P. A.-Reuter—Copyright) SAIGON, April 14. Three politicians opposed to the Government have been quietly released from “protective custody” by the South Vietnamese Government,

The trio—the Presidential candidate runner-up, Truong Dinh Dzu, the former Minister of Economy, Au Truong Thanh, and a judge, Tran Thue Linh—were released last night and allowed to return to their homes after having been in police custody, without being charged, for more than seven weeks. But the militant monk, Thich Tri Quang, and five of his colleagues arrested at the saifte time were still being held today. The arrests were the subject of a series of talks between the South Vietnamese Government and officials of the United States Embassy. American sources indicated after the arrests that the United States was disturbed by the Government’s police tactics.

A fourth man opposed to the Government, a former Minister of Defence, Ho Thong Minh, was put on a plane bound for France on Thursday night. A Minister under the late President Ngo Dinh Diem, he lived in France for several years after Diem’s overthrow, but returned to South Vietnam shortly before the Communist’s Tet offensive. Although no formal charges were brought against any of the 20 men arrested, Government sources say that the names of the politicians were on a captured Viet Cong list of possible participants in a coalition government. No such list has, however, been produced by the Government, which had announced the detention of only

three of the men—the three released last night. All those arrested were kept in relatively comfortable quarters, Minh in a villa at the national police headquarters in Saigon and the three others and the monks at a police villa elsewhere in Saigon.