BOAC To Fly Refugees

Northern Advocate, 2 September 1947, Page 5

BOAC To Fly Refugees

Punjab Civil War. . .

(Rec. 11 a.m.) LONDON, Sept. 1. The, BOAC, following a renewed request from the Pakistan Government for aircraft to fly between Delhi and Karachi, announced that all aircraft available are resuming their interrupted flights to India. The officials are urgently required to form a Pakistan administration in the new capital, but disorders have interrupted essential land transport services.

The BOAC said the aircraft are to be used to fly 7000 refugees from Delhi to Karachi. The Pakistan Government has countermanded its cancellation of an order for a BOAC shuttle service between Delhi and Karachi for marooned officials and their families.

It is reported from Lahore that RAF Dakotas will be used on four days this week to fly Pakistan officials and railway workers from Delhi to Lahore. Returning, the planes will ferry Indian Dominion officials to Delhi.

Thd Bengal Government reported that 29 people were killed and 292 injured in communal riots in Calcutta today. GANDHI FASTING Gandhi began a fast “to end only if, and when, sanity returns to Calcutta where there.is a new outbreak of communal rioting.” Mr Gandhi, in a statement, said: “The weapon which has hitherto proved infallible for me is fasting. What my word, in person, cannot do my fast may.” ' Gandhi’s last major fast after he was arrested in 1942 was when he launched the Congress “Quit India” campaign which followed the Cripps’ emission. 400,000 VICTIMS An estimate of the number of victims in the Punjab civil war computed . on the basis of such facts as are definitely known gives 100,000 dead and 300,000 homeless, pays the Daily Telegraph correspondent. The present state of public order in Lahore is exemplied by the fate of six Sikhs acquitted of murder by the District Court. All were stabbed to death before they left the precincts, one while sheltering behind the Judge’s chair. t, • Waylaying of express trains to murder members of one or the other com-' munity has become almost a matter of routine. The Frontier Mail, one of the most important expresses run daily, is regularly ambushed. Reuters correspondent in Lahore says the last 200 Sikhs and Hindus in Shaikpura, in the Pakistan province of West Punjab, are huddled amid flies and filth in a tiny courtyard in the blackened, reeking town which was once a flourishing trading centre. “LIARS, FOOLS, ROGUES” Men among them broke into tears when Mr Nehru in the course of his tour of the devastated areas, assured them of speedy evacuation. A crowd of Moslem refugees stopped Mr Nehru’s car as he .drove through the wrecked streets and demanded that he stop the war. Mr Nehru asked who started the war. When they said it was the Sikhs' Mr Nehru leaned from his car in a fury and said: “Liars, fools, rogues.” Brigadier Thimayya, Indian liaison officer with the boundary force, who arrived at Shaikpura on August 24 with a convoy of lorries to evacuate refugees, told Mr Nehru that he saw police shooting down people as they ran frpm burning houses. He found about 50 police inactive . outside the police station while Shaikpura was blazing, and shooting was , going on. Brigadier Thimayya said about 3000 refugees had been evacuated from ' Shaikpura and about 700 bodies had been recovered. Nothing was known about the remainder of the population. Refugees had claimed that troops as well as police shot them down. , According to an East Punjab Government communique the situation in l East Punjab (India) has greatly im- . proved and is almost normal in Amritsar. '