CHICAGO SUN TIMES. MONDAY. JUNE 28. 1971
PAKISTANI PATROL PLUNDERS
PART OF VILLAGE; SEVERAL DIE
Boliadi, East Pakistan (AP)-A platoon of the Pakistani army smashed into the, Hindu section of this waterlogged village before dawn Sunday, shooting residents, ransacking homes and burning the market.
Twenty minutes after 24 West Pakistani soldiers and another dozen men in the uniform of the Frontier Corps, whose headquarters is more than 1,(MX) miles West of here, left the village, the commander, who identified himself as Maj. Omar, told a newsmen the troops had been on a “routine patrol.”
The major, who said, “I should not have told you my name,” wore a blue beret and was barefoot. His men carried automatic rifles and umbrellas to stay dry in the monsoon rain.
An inspection showed they left three dead men and a desolated village still burning so fiercely the heat drove witnesses away and bucked iron sheets.
A few old women and children mourned the dead on walled in Bengali, “They have taken everything.
The rest of the village, which local Moslem residents said once housed 100 families, had fled into the jute fields or across the creeks.
The body of a white-haired man was stretched across the mat in the ground-floor store of a two-story corrugated iron shack. A bullet had gone through his back.
Villagers said that besides the three visible bodies another five or six were killed in the five-hour attack.
The attack occurred an hour’s drive northwest of Dacca where four British parliamentarians, investigating the situation in East Pakistan, slept on the final day of their visit. It also came at the same time ships, carrying U.S. ammunition and spares for the Pakistan army, were heading toward Karachi in West Pakistan.
The besieged town is the ancestral home of Justice B. K. Siddiky, Bengali chief justice who defied orders early in March and refugees to swear in Lt. Gen. Tikka Khan as the new military governor of the province.
He conducted the swearing-in after the army crushed Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and banned the Awami League on March 25. He has been removed as head of the Pakistan Red Cross, and villagers said he has been deposed as chief justice.
Moslem villagers and many students who have fled Dacca since March 25 said that since Friday army patrols, some landing in small boats, have been striking at villages within a six mile radius of this part of Dacca district.
Smoke could be seen and shots could be heard through the morning from the direction of those villages.
Villagers said they believed the attacks were connected with reports of steppedup activity by Bangladesh secessionists based 28 miles to the north near Tangail on the Brahmaputra River.