Vietnam border fighting fierce

Press, 9 January 1987, Page 6

Vietnam border fighting fierce

NZPA-Reuter Peking

China and Vietnam said yesterday their troops were still engaged in a fierce border clash in which Hanoi claimed to have killed more than 500 Chinese soldiers this week.

The official New China News Agency, in its first statement on casualties, said Chinese frontier guards at Laoshan, in Yunnan province, had wiped out 200 Vietnamese troops while repulsing their attacks. It said a Vietnamese company was “annihilated” yesterday, and that the fighting was still going on.

The Vietnam New Agency (V.N.A,) said last Tuesday that Vietnamese troops had decimated a Chinese division that tried to seize four hilltops in the border province of Ha Tuyen under the cover of bad weather last Monday.

V.N.A., monitored in Bangkok, said an attack

by the Chinese in a border area 275 km north of Hanoi had been repulsed, with Chinese forces leaving behind large amounts of weapons and equipment. A Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman yesterday confirmed the clash, but disputed Hanoi’s claim of 500 Chinese casualties, saying the report was designed to deceive the Vietnamese and world opinion.

Diplomats said the casualty figure, if confirmed, would be the highest, since the two countries fought a brief war in 1979. They had had intermittent clashes since then. Vietnamese officials in Peking have described the incident as the largest border clash for at least a year. They said Chinese troops, under cover of thick fog and bad weather, fired more than 10,000 shells last Monday before advancing into Vietnamese territory.