MYSTERY AIRCRAFT

Otago Daily Times, Issue 26531, 5 August 1947, Page 5

MYSTERY AIRCRAFT

OWNED BY DOMINICAN PRESIDENT POLITICAL EXILE’S CLAIM Rec. 10 p.m. NEW YORK, Aug 3. Mr J. A. Bonille Atiles, secretary of the Dominican Revindication Association which consists of political exiles in New York, asserted to-day that the seven missing war planes which were reported ready to take off from the United States to support an alleged revolutionary movement against the Dominican Republic, actually belonged to President Rafael Trujillo and already had landed on his estate near Cuidad Trujillo, the Dominican capital. Mr Atiles also denied, first that three vessels with revolutionaries on board had left Cuba, and secondly, that exiles plotted the invasion. He asserted that the entire story was an invention by President Trujillo and the Dominican Ambassador to Washington. Senor Julio Ortego Frier.

A message received on Sunday stated that the Collector of Customs at Tampa. Florida, had asked all airports to be on the alert for a reoorted unauthorised flight of seven fighter planes to a “foreign country.” The planes were described as privately cwned. five of them Mustangs and two Lightnings. Asked if the planes might be heading for the Dominican Republic, one official informed the United Press that “it was possible.”