Frogmen sink cargo vessel

Press, Volume CXII, Issue 33094, 8 December 1972, Page 13

Frogmen sink cargo vessel

(N'.Z.P.A. -Reuter—Copyright) PHNOM PENH, December 7. Frogmen today entered the docks at Phnom Penh under cover of darkness, and sank one of the small cargo ships that provide the capital’s supply lifeline from the outside world.

Officials say that the frogmen were spotted as they were attaching plastic explosives to the vessel, but that the charge went off when military police and naval experts were trying to defuse it. Four men were killed, and 15 wounded by the blast.

Two of the frogmen are known to have been killed trying to escape. The ship, the 2881 ton Bright Star, registered in Panama, was the fourth to be mined in the docks in the last month. One was sunk, and the two others were damaged. At least one other ship has been sunk while travelling up the Mekong River from South Vietnam to Phnom Penh.

uainagcu. At least one other ship has been sunk while travelling up the Mekong River from South Vietnam to Phnom Penh. In today’s attack, one of the four men killed was a member of the Hong Kong Chinese crew of the Bright Star. The ship was badly holed by the early-morning blast, and she had settled to the bottom of the river front harbour by dawn. The weekly convoys — averaging a dozen ships each — which come upriver protected by gunboats and aircraft, are vital to the Cambodian capital, whose road links with the outside world are almost continuously severed by fighting. Phnom Penh and the surrounding Government-held enclave depends on the convoys for all petroleum supplies, American military equipment, and the large Printers strike A one-day strike bv printing workers yesterday prevented eight newspaners in Western France from appearing. The stoppage was the first of a series of one-dav strikes which will affect different parts of France as printing workers press their claims for h-'oher wages. — Paris, December 7.

quantities of imported food required to meet a domestic rice shortage.