ARMED GANGS COMMIT MURDER AND ARSON.

Chronicle (Levin), 21 June 1948, Page 5

ARMED GANGS COMMIT MURDER AND ARSON.

SINGAPORE, June 20. Five Chinese arnied with Sten guns and revolvers, last night murdered the Chinese manager of the Chan Wing estate at Bekok Labis in the southerniiiost State of Johore, Another partjr of Chinese armed with rifles and sawn-off shotguns, Jooted the provisiqn store of a .Tohore river estate. The leaders of the former Malayan 'Peqple's Anti-Japanese Army in Johore, have gone undergronnd and-called on ex-members to rejoin on an "active basis, " savxs the' Sundav- Tirnes. The police say ex-guerrilla chiefs have already taken to the hills and the "call to arms" is a prqliminary to com- , menc^nient . of . large scale guerrilla activity. A Chinese gang of 20 men yesterday burned dovvn a rubher factory on the S'yor estate in Ivluang. At the Dublin estare, Kulim, Chinese gunmen shot a rubber contractov tlirough the neck in the presence of his vvife. The vietirn fled from the house, but the gunmen followed and killed him with three more shots. The dead man was recentlj' involved in a Court case in which II labourers were imprisonerl for criminal intimidation of other labourers. Four armed Chinese at Ealing, a few miles from the Siamese border, shot dead a Chinese rubber mero.hant, who is also headman of the Chinese eominnnity, while he was walking through the village. European mine and estpte managers in the Tpoh area are organising q sweepstalce among tffemselves on where, vv-hen, and against whom the Communist killers .will strike next. No date goes beyond the weekend, and those named on the favoui'ite "tiekets" live in the Tapah area, 40 miles south of Ipoh. The basis for t'he fears is the rupoHed movement of men in the nearby Bikam forest reserve, where a large arms dump was recently discoverqd,