PROBE BY BRITAIN

Gisborne Herald, Volume LXXV, Issue 22569, 24 February 1948, Page 5

PROBE BY BRITAIN

CHARGE CLOSE WATCH IN PRAGUE SOVIET ENVOY'S VISIT (10 a.m.) LONDON, Feb. 23. The allegations which have been made in Prague that the Czech officer. General Lew Prchala, and the exiled Polish officer, General Anders, had “engineered the Czech plot against the State in the interests of a certain foreign Power” would be investigated. The British Foreign Office spokesman made this announcement at a press conference today. Asked whether Britain had the right to concern itself with happenings in Czechoslovakia, the spokesman said it was natural for any democratic country to concern itself with the fate of another democracy. The spokesman added that the presence in Prague at present of the Soviet Deputy Foreign Minister, M. Zorin, had been noted with interest since another Soviet deputy Foreign Minister, M. Vyshinsky, had visited Bucharest in March, 1945, when M. Groza’s Commun-ist-controlled Government came into power in Rumania. The Moscow radio said today that the Western European press in “publishing provocative stories that the Communists had engineered the Czech crisis, is attempting to justify the reactionary Czech politicians’ endeavour to sabotage the nationalisation programme at the expense of splitting the Government. “There is no crisis except in the reactionary camp,’’ added the radio. “The Czech reactionary elements chose the present pre-election moment for provocation because the national front is gaining strength and becoming a really broad union of all the country’s democratic forces and not merely a coalition of parties and leaders.”