TRAGIC LAST JOURNEY

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXX, Issue 21467, 15 April 1933, Page 2 (Supplement)

TRAGIC LAST JOURNEY

WOMAN POISONS HERSELF ALLEGED DANGEROUS SPY rFOLLOWED BY FRENCH POLICE Following a search of papers left behind when she hurriedly quitted Pans to poison herself in London, the trench Secret Service has mado amazing allegations against Madame Zcinap Vlora, the mysterious Albanian beauty who was found (lying near the Cenotaph. It was declared that her hectic love affairs were a blind to her real work that of a dangerous international spy —and that she took her life when she found arrest was imminent. On her last journey she was followed by the French police, and steps were taken to intercept her if she should try to return to France. Madame Vlora had an unhappy love affair that in part accounted for her suicide, but since investigating the documents she left in Paris the French secret service police assert that she was a dangerous spy working on behalf of two European Powers. Her love affairs, they allege, were turned to account in her espionage, and both Briyiin Franco had grounds for thinking her activities were harmful to their respective interests. Since Madame Vlora first went to Franco, according to the story of the police, she had gone out of her way to cultivate acquaintances in diplomatic and official as well as in naval and military circles. Her communications with the two countries she was serving were carried on through tho agency of a diplomatic courier, whom she duped into believing that they were love letters to a man of whose existence

she desired her husband to be kept in ignorance. Shortly before Madame Vlora s death, certainly, she was deeply distressed over a broken love affair. It is now declared that the reason the man in question broke with her was that he discovered he had been seriously compromised by various uses she had made of his position in the diplomatic service to further her ends, notably in obtaining facilities for approach to officers, whom she afterwards " vamped " into helping her. On the night the woman left Paris, the police allege, one of the young diplomats she had compromised told her that her ruse had been discovered, and that unless she left France at once her arrest was only a matter of time. She had also been advised that one of the Powers employing her had found that she was attempting to double-cross them. When Madame Vlora left Paris fpr London she was followed by the agent of the French political police in. charge of the surveillance over her. In London, it is said, she hoped to see the one man in a position to get her back her lovj?r and reinstate her in favour with her employers. This man, however, refused to see her. To add to her distress, the police allege, she learned that her activities as a spy had been revealed coihpletely. |

At the same time the French detective who had followed the woman to London learned something that caused liiin to advise her arrest immediately she returned to France. Steps were also taken to intercept her should she try to return to the Continent via Belgium. For sonic time after Madame Vlora's death, which was kept- secret in both France and Britain, police officers were in constant attendance at certain telephone numbers she was in the habit of using in the hope that agents of another Power, with whom she was in communication, would try to got in touch with her.