Missile site raided in North Vietnam

Press, Volume CXI, Issue 32588, 23 April 1971, Page 9

Missile site raided in North Vietnam

(N.Z.P. A.-Reuter—Copyright)

SAIGON, April 22.

An air raid was made on North Vietnam on Tuesday, when a United States Navy fighter-bomber fired a single rocket at an anti-aircraft missile site in the Mu Gia Pass, 70 miles north of the Demilitarised Zone, an American military spokesman disclosed today.

It was the twenty-fifth air strike inside North Vietnam this year.

The Mu Gia Pass is the most important route for North Vietnamese 'supplies flowing across the mountains to the lop of the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Bomb attacks in Southern Laos are frequently concentrated on the western end of the pass. ■ North Vietnamese surface-to-air missile sites are spread along the border and the

United States Military Command has declared that, under an inherent right of selfdefence, its aircraft can fire into North Vietnam in “protective reaction” when they detect radar signals which indicate that a missile is about to be fired. Neither the American nor the South Vietnamese commands have reported any fighting in the A Shau Valley, an important infiltration route along the Laotian border in northern South

Vietnam, where a new operation was begun last weekend. But in the western Central Highlands, where heavy fighting raged round a beseiged South Vietnamese firebase early this month, American aircraft have been attacking isolated North Vietnamese targets. Twenty North Vietnamese are said to have been killed in two such strikes yesterday, and South Vietnamese troops found the bodies of 12 killed by earlier air attacks. A cache of North Vietnamese rockets was destroyed. One Regional Force militia man was killed by a Viet Cong rocket fired into the city of Hue late last night. In the far south-west, Government troops reported killing seven Viet Cong guerrillas in the flooded U Minh Forest, which for a long time has been a Viet Cong stronghold.