PLANE LENT TO SMUGGLERS

Press, Volume XC, Issue 27396, 8 July 1954, Page 6

PLANE LENT TO SMUGGLERS

Police Ruse Succeeds In Egypt Press Association—Copyright) CAIRO, July 6. A policeman disguised as a mechanic struggled in mid-air with an alleged smuggler today in an aeroplane carrying about a ton of contraband narcotic drugs. Egyptian police put a disguised military aeroplane at the smugglers’ disposal when an airport official claimed he had been offered about £4OOO for the use of a machine to smuggle drugs from El Arish—a well-known smugglers’ rendezvous on the Palestine frontier —to a deserted airfield at Qassassin, half-way between the British garrison towns of Te!-el-Kebir and Ismailia.

The pilot, instead of landing at the airfield, flew on to Cairo where the drugs were seized and the alleged gang leader and eight accomplices were arrested.

Egypt’s Minister of the Interior (Lieutenant-Colonel Zakaria Moheiddin) directed the police trap. He decided that a constable dressed as a mechanic should accompany the pilot and radio operator, and that all three should be armed.

The aeroplane took off from Cairo and landed near El Arish where hashish and opium were taken on. A radio signal to Cairo then warned that the aeroplane had taken off again. While police swooped on the Qassassin airfield and arrested alleged smugglers waiting there for the aeroplane a dramatic struggle was going on in mid-air between the constable and a member of the gang who -had travelled in the aeroplane from Cairo. The man was overpowered snd handcuffed.