RAILWAY CLOSED

Otago Daily Times, Issue 23353, 19 November 1937, Page 9

RAILWAY CLOSED

IN FRENCH INDO-CHINA PREVENTING PASSAGE OF ARMS HINT FROM THE JAPANESE (United Press Association) (By Electric Telegraph—Copyright) LONDON, Nov. 17. The Australian Associated Press learns that France has closed the French Indo-China railway against the passage of arms to China, it is understood owing to hints that the Japanese will bomb railway towns if the traffic continues. CONTRADICTORY STATEMENTS PARIS, Nov. 17.

M. Henri Berenger, chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the French Senate, in a speech at a Conference des Ambassadeurs, a private organisation of those interested in foreign affairs, recalled the remarks which the Japanese Ambassador made at the Quai d’Orsay at the beginning of the present war in the Far East, the purpose of which was to inform France that any intervention, even sending supplies to China across French Indo-China might result in the occupation of Hainan Island and certain French Indo-China ports. Mr Ystaro Sugimura, the Japanese Ambassador, denies M. Berenger’s statements that Japan had sent an ultimatum to France concerning arms and shipments to China by the Yunan railway, and added: “We are prepared to occupy any part of China where arms might come through. If the French ever considered sending a mass of armaments to China through Indo-China we would cut their communications in Chinese territory.”