U.S. correspondent insists spy charges unfounded7

Press, 22 July 1986, Page 10

U.S. correspondent insists spy charges unfounded 7

NZPA-Reuter Peking Chinese officials yesterday allowed a “New York Times” correspondent, John Burns, to see embassy officials for the first time since he was detained last week by the police on suspicion of spying. Mr Burns’ wife, Jane Scott-Long, said after a brief meeting with her husband in an office of the Public Security Bureau that he insisted that “all the charges are unfounded.” The British consul, Frank Savage, said that he had seen Mr Burns, a British citizen, and that he was “fit and well and in good heart.”

A United States embassy counsellor, Lynn Noah, who saw Mr Burns in a separate meeting, said the United States Government was "extremely concerned.”

“We have urged the Chinese Government to provide the fullest information on the case at the earliest possible date,” he said. The detention stems from a trip Mr Bums made early this month through parts of central China usually closed to foreigners. He was stopped by the police in Shaanxi province, accused of being in a closed area and had film confiscated. Chinese officials have said Mr Burns, aged 41, was being held on suspicion of “entering an area forbidden to foreigners, gathering Intelligence information and espionage.”

The executive editor of the “New York Times,” Abraham Rosenthal, who arrived in Peking on Saturday to try to negotiate a release, said he under-

stood Mr Bums was being welltreated.

On Saturday, he said the espionage charge was nonsense and the result of a misunderstanding. “John is a newspaper person and just a newspaper person,” he said.

Mr Burns is the first foreign journalist to be detained in China on suspicion of spying since the rise to power of Deng Xiaoping in 1979, and one of only a handful of foreigners to have been detained for any reason since then. Travel restrictions on foreigners in China have been progressively relaxed in recent years as Peking has opened its doors to foreign tourists and foreign investment But large areas of the country are still officially closed to foreigners without a special permit