Merchant ‘saw’ p.o.w.s labouring in Laos

Press, 9 January 1986, Page 6

Merchant ‘saw’ p.o.w.s labouring in Laos

NZPA-AFP Fayettville, North Carolina A Thai gold merchant asserts he saw Americans being used for gold mining labour in Laos as recently as October. The merchant, using the false name John Obbasy because he said he feared for his life, said in an affidavit that he had met also Americans trading in precious metals in Laos who were identified by anti-com-munist forces as former American prisoners of war. Mr Obbasy submitted his affidavit on Monday in support of a lawsuit filed in court at Fayettville, North Carolina, against the United States Government claiming that it had not done every-

thing possible to obtain the release of Americans still held in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, in the wake of the Vietnam war.

Mr Obbasy, a former British subject and now a Thai citizen, said he saw a work detail of 39 men, “which I strongly believe to be Americans” in October.

He first saw people he believed to be Americans working in gold mining details in 1978 and since then had seen about 20 such work groups. He first reported the information to United States Embassy officials in Bangkok in 1980 but asserted that after doing so and turning down an offer to work for the Central Intelligence

Agency his business in Thailand and his reputation had been adversely affected “as well as my personal life and my economic well-being.”. Mr Obbasy’s affidavit was filed at the same time as a high-level United States delegation met Vietnamese officials in Hanoi to discuss ways of speeding up the search for missing American servicemen.

The delegation’s leader, an Assistant Defence Secretary, Mr Richard Armitage, denied that the Government was covering up reports that Americans were still being held prisoner in Indochina.

Such allegations were harming official efforts to resolve the fate of about

2400 Americans still unaccounted, he said.

Mr Obbasy’s affidavit was in support of a lawsuit brought by two former special forces members, Mark Smith and Melvin Mclntyre, and relatives of missing servicemen. Other affidavits include one from an ex-serviceman, Scott Barnes, who said he was part of a privately funded reconnaissance force which made several unsuccessful raids into Laos in the 1980 s to find prisoners of war. In his affidavit he said that on one raid he had seen two Americans and on his return to Thailand was ordered to “liquidate” them by a United States official.