Cable Briefs

Press, 10 July 1979, Page 8

Cable Briefs

Plot uncovered Iran’s military police chief, General Saif Amir Rahimi, has said he has uncovered a plot by senior Army officers to provoke a serious confrontation between rival units and weaken the revolution. General Rahimi told foreign reporters at his central Teheran headquarters that some of the plotters had already gone underground and that he hoped the rest would be rounded up within 48 hours. ■ — Teheran., Kampuchea moves Considerable diplomatic activity among big and small Powers is under way to get Vietnam to withdraw its troops from Kampuchea and to establish a neutral and nationalist government in Phnom Penh, well-in-formed diplomats have said in Manila. The contacts over the last few weeks had involved at the highest level the United States, Japan, China, the Soviet Union and the Association of ■ SouthEast Asian Nations, they said. Alternatives discussed included holding an international conference of all interested parties similar to the Geneva conference of 1962 that tried to settle the Laos problem by establishing an acceptable neutralist Government, they said. — Manila. Bomb sentence A 41-year-old man convicted of bombing the Boans department store in the Perth suburb of Innaloo last April has been sentenced today to life imprisonment. Ronald William Carlsen, aged 41, will also serve seven years concurrently for attempting to extort sAustlso,ooo from a store director. The West Australia Supreme Court was told that Carlsen had bought 20 sticks of gelignite, an alarm clock, and batteries, and made a time bomb which went off when 136 people were in the store. No-one was hurt. — Perth. Wilding dead A British actor, Michael Wilding, died at the weekend aged 66. He was best known as the debonair screen star of a series of light-hearted comedies. Wilding, who was once married to Elizabeth Taylor, made his name in the 1940 s when he partnered Anna Neagle in a string of films, acting the archetypal Englishman who did not always get the girl. — London. Crew blamed

A Sri Lanka Governmentappointed investigator has blamed a plane crash that killed 183 people last November on failure of the flight crew to conform to landing-approach procedures, and flying too low. The inquiry report said the co-pilot of the Icelandic Airways DCB had failed to provide the captain with required altitude and sink-rate call-outs at various levels of the descent towards Colombo. It

said that when the captain, realising he was not going to make the runway, tried to overshoot, he had descended too low. — Colombo.