PAGODA SIEGE Some Buddhists Refuse Release

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31093, 23 June 1966, Page 13

PAGODA SIEGE Some Buddhists Refuse Release

(N.Z.P.A. Reuter—Copyright) SAIGON, June 22. A hundred anti-government Buddhists, besieged inside their Saigon pagoda headquarters for four days by a ring of steel-helmeted riot police, today rejected an offer of freedom.

Police pulled back coils of barbed wire this morning and gave the occupants of the Vien Hoa Dao pagoda one ' hour to come out and go free.

About 200—including 30 monks and a nun—■came out, but an estimated 100 decided to remain.

Police appealed over a loud-speaker to the Buddhists still inside to leave and return to their homes. The only response was the steady beating of prayer gongs and chanting. Police re-sealed the pagoda’s entrance.

Barricades were thrown up last Saturday morning after militant Buddhist youths had attacked and shot a Saigon policeman with his own pistol before fleeing inside the pagoda. Throughout the week-end the Buddhists inside had refused to answer police appeals to hand over the killer and the weapon.

Police agreed to lift the blockade for an hour after

the moderate Buddhist leader, Thich Tam Chau, had called for an end to the fourday siege. Meanwhile, South Vietnam’s fasting Buddhist leader Thich Tri Quang has vowed to continue his campaign to topple the govem-

ment of Prime Minister Nguyen Cao Ky. “I do not know how I shall do it—but the struggle must be carried on,” he said In an interview last night in the Saigon clinic where he is under detention. The 44-year-old monk, who has been on a hunger strike against United States support for the Saigon government for two weeks, was flown to Saigon yesterday from the dissident northern city of Hue.