Visiting Team from Terror Tech

A new technical school on the Indonesian island of Batam, just ten miles across the straits from Singapore, doesn't have a sports schedule, but its students still play lots of games away. Housed in a cluster of tin-roofed, concrete-block buildings, the institution is a school for sabotage founded by Indonesian President Sukarno as part of his "confrontation" with the Malaysian Federation. At Batam Tech, students get a month's intensive training in such subjects as judo and jellied explosives; on graduation day they receive, instead of a sheepskin, a time bomb or a grenade or a burp gun. Then they set sail to infiltrate the Malaysian territory of Singapore, where this year they have set off 20-odd bombs, killing two persons and injuring seven.

Two weeks ago, a band of Batam's most promising alumni embarked on their school's boldest venture to date. With fellow "volunteers" from the Indonesian island of Sumatra, they formed a guerrilla force that bore down on the Malay Peninsula in a flotilla of 30-ft. outboard motorboats, debarked at three points along the swampy coast only 35 miles north of Singapore. The raid was an Indonesian attempt to open a second front on the Malayan mainland itself in Sukarno's undeclared war, which so far has been chiefly confined to the Indonesian-Malaysian border in Borneo.

Though told that they would be welcomed as liberators, the visitors enjoyed little hospitality. Fishermen raced to sound the alarm. Rubber tappers in one village spotted three invaders through the trees, captured them on the spot. Guided by locals, government helicopters and troops swarmed in, engaged the raiders in a series of running machine gun fights. By last week the government had killed 18, captured 47, was endeavoring to mop up an estimated 35 still at large. Of the 65 accounted for, a score or more were Malaysian traitors recruited in Malaya and trained on either Batam or Sumatra. Several were Malayan Chinese who left evidence that the threat to Malaysia comes not only from Indonesia. Captured with the guerrillas were Red Chinese-manufactured hand grenades, a Chinese Communist flag and political tracts published in Peking.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.