Bombs at the Border

Across the Lowu railroad bridge into Communist China one morning last week bustled the everyday traffic from Hong Kong: pongee-clad farmers hauling produce, old women bent double under sacks of flour, visitors with gifts for relatives on the mainland. By mid-morning 200 travelers had crossed the frontier, and one of them was carrying a lethal parcel. Then, as the line shuffled through Red China's wooden customs shed, a powerful blast splintered the building, killed an inspector and a woman traveler, injured 27 others.

Red reinforcements rushed to the border and sealed it off while they rounded up 500 suspects.

In 13 years of rule, the Communists had never before closed the frontier with Hong Kong. Last week they were growing ever more edgy--with good reason. In the past month seven bombs, presumably planted by Nationalist underground agents, have killed five people and wounded 40 others inside Red China. The terrorists have blown up a blockhouse, a dynamite magazine, a bank, a stretch of railway near the borders of Hong Kong and Macao. An attempt was also made to destroy a Macao-Canton ferryboat, but it was foiled when crewmen discovered a tin labeled "Apricot Kernel Cakes with Meat Filling" behind a men's room mirror. It was a TNT bomb, and the passenger suspected of planting it was executed two weeks ago.

The latest scare closed the border for 22 hours. Afterward, traffic inched across the bridge at snail's pace as guards screened packages with mine detectors.

They were even ordered to check the two-pound parcels of food that pour into the hungry mainland at the rate of more than 1,000,000 a month. Day after the explosion that sealed the border, a bomb was found in a food parcel.

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