Vultures Await Biafrans’ End

Press, Volume CVIII, Issue 31727, 10 July 1968, Page 13

Vultures Await Biafrans’ End

(N.Z. P~A.-Reuter —Copyright) LONDON, July 9. Vultures line the walls of a refugee camp in the Biafran town of Ikot Ekpene, waiting to swoop on women and children dying from hunger, according to a Save die Children Fund official.

Mr John Birch, administrator in Nigeria for the fund, describes the town as “a hell of torment, humiliation, hunger and death,” in a message received at the fund’s headquarters in London.

“Some 1500 persons were literally dying of malnutri-

tion and some had sold the clothes they wore for twopence to buy food,” Mr Birch reported. “Vultures moved from wall to wall and roof to roof in great numbers ready to descend on a human meal.” The refugees are housed in a local prison built to hold 200 people, and every cell is crowded with displaced persons, mostly women and children. A warder is quoted as saying 20 or 30 died on the day of Mr Birch's visit. “Unless rice and beans arrive at Ikot Ekpene in the next few days, all these people in the prison will either have made the vultures fat or lie in the graves already prepared for them,” Mr Birch says. A British relief mission, led by Lord Hunt, now in Nigeria, is due to visit the town.