Viet Cong Seize Photographers

Press, Volume CIX, Issue 32266, 8 April 1970, Page 15

Viet Cong Seize Photographers

(N.Z. Press Association—Copyright) PHNOM PENH, April 7. Five news photographers are reported to have been captured by Viet Cong guerrillas in Cambodia.

They are believed to include a freelance, Sean Flynn, aged 29, son of the late American actor, Errol Flynn, and Dana Stone, aged 30, who was on an assignment for the Columbia Broadcasting System’s news department. Japanese journalists say that the others captured were a French photographer, Claude Arpin, and two Japanese cameramen representing a Fuji commercial television company, Yujiro Takagi and Akira Kusaka.

The Japanese Foreign Ministry in Tokyo says that its embassy in Phnom Penh has reported that three others, either American or French, are also missing, believed captured, but their identities are not known. About 80 reporters and photographers made a Gov-ernment-sponsored visit to Chi Phou, where a military outpost had been attacked by the Viet Cong, during the week-end. Most of them returned later to Phnom Penh.

Military sources say that of a group of about 600 Cambodians who were surrounded, two were killed and 10 were wounded in fighting near Chi Phou on Friday night.

About 50 Cambodian Government troops were killed in clashes with the Viet Cong elsewhere during the weekend, according to military sources in the capital. The fighting was near the town of Kompong Trach, 85 miles south of the capital and close to the border with South Vietnam.