Landing craft takes foreigners to safety

Press, 28 July 1976, Page 8

Landing craft takes foreigners to safety

NZPA-Reuter, Beirut A United States Navy landing craft yesterday evacuated some 300 Americans and other foreigners from war-ravaged Beirut in a smooth, one-hour operation under strict security provided by the Palestine Liberation Organisation. The United States Ambassador (Mr Talcott Seelye) was among about 20 U.S. Embassy staff to join the seventh, and probably last, organised evacuation from the strife-torn city, but nearly two-fifths of the 500 people who registered failed to show up. “I guess they just didn’t want to leave,”' shrugged an embassv official. Flying the American flag and carrying an unarmed crew of 30, the landing craft steamed in from its mother ship, the U.S.S. Coronado, at 8.30 a.m. (local time) and, after some difficulty in the heavy swells, let down its

landing ramp to take aboard the evacuees. Doubt still hangs over attempts to rescue more than 1000 wounded Palestinians from the beseiged refugee camp of Tel Al-Zaatar, and over the fate of several hundred people trapped in what a Palestinian spokesman has said may become a “mass grave.” Officials of the International Red Cross Committee were yesterday working on plans to bring the wounded out of Tel AlZaatar, which has been surrounded and under heavy attack by Right-wing Chustian forces for more than a month. Dr Hassan Sabri Al-Kholi, the envoy of the ' Aiab League, renounced that leaders of the three main Lebanese Right-wing groups had agreed to permit the wounded to be brought out of the Palestinian camp. But there was no indication whether several smaller

Right-wing groups, which earlier demanded complete surrender of the camp, would silence their guns for an evacuation. Dr Kholi said that President Suleimaa Franjieh. the National Liberal Party leader (Mr Camille Chamoun), and the Phalangist leader (Mr Pierre Gemayel) had all agreed on the need to bring the wounded out of Tel AlZaatar. Heavy shelling of the camp blocked previous Red Cross attempts to bring out the wounded, and hampered rescue efforts at an underground shelter which, according to Palestinian reports, collapsed under shellfire on Saturday night. According to the Voice of Palestine Radio, at least 250 people — and probably 400 — most of them old people, women, and children, were in the shelter when it collapsed. Twenty injured people had been rescued, and seven bodies dug out of the rubble, the radio said.