6000 withdraw from Cambodia

Press, Volume CXII, Issue 32879, 30 March 1972, Page 11

6000 withdraw from Cambodia

(N.Z.P.A.-Reuter— Copyright?

SAIGON, March 29.

About 6000 South Vietnamese troops pulled out of south-east Cambodia yesterday to regroup for a deeper drive within a few days into North Vietnamese arms sanctuaries in the rubber plantations of the neighbouring republic, military sources said today.

The three-week dry season sweep through the “Dog’s Face” border area around Kompong Trach town was the most successful in two years. A total of 766 North Vietnamese and Cambodian Communists were killed and 37 prisoners taken. Most of the casualties were inflicted by American and South Vietnamese air strikes, the sources said. Government losses in the few ground contacts were eight Killed and 63 wounded, they added.

The haul of arms, found lying unguarded under trees and nearly all brand new East German weapons, amounted to 1154 rifles and pistols and 37 machine-guns and mortars. Several hundred tons of ammunition were with the weapons.

Six military trucks, 789 tons of rice, 45 tons of salt, three generators, 15 field radios, three outboard motors, one telephone switchboard and 67,000 yards of telephone wire were also seized. Such big piles of North; Vietnamese war materials 1 have not been uncovered by Saigon or American forces since the first joint operation was launched into East Cambodia in April, 1970.

A Hong Kong report says that North Vietnam has called on the United States to return to the Vietnam Paris peace conference, suspended indefinitely by President Nixon last Saturday. The North Vietnamese

Foreign Ministry, in a statement reported today by the North Vietnam News Agency said that the United States must attend the conference regularly and to negotiate the Vietnam issue seriously. In Saigon police today fired cannisters of tear-gas all round South Vietnam’s national assembly building to break up a sit-down demonstration by about 30 students at the entrance. The students were protesting against the arrest and

imprisonment of 72 student leaders—some have been held since 1968 on charges of sabotaging national security. This charge covers such actions as destroying election posters.

The United States today handed over the first of its five major air bases in South Vietnam to the Saigon Government, as American troop withdrawals reached a daily average of 1000 men. Phan Rang base, on the coast, 170 miles north of Saigon, was a big supply and distribution depot for arms and equipment flown in from the United States to soldiers in the battlefields.