No Murders Today

In a Malacca jungle last week, Acting Police Corporal Roslan Bin Haji Mohammed waited three nights for his quarry. Someone had "whispered," i.e., informed, against noisy, hunchbacked Cheung Kit Ming, better known as "the Ape of Malacca." A top Communist guerrilla, a veteran killer and terrorist, Cheung had a $25,000 price on his head. On the third night of the ambush, the Ape appeared and the police corporal shot him dead.

General Sir Gerald Templer, Britain's crisp, aggressive High Commissioner for Malaya, is slowly gaining ground in his war with the Red guerrillas. He has some 400,000 troops, police and home guards against about 5,000 Communists. Malaya is laced with barbed wire, crisscrossed with searchlights, webbed with interlocking patrols. More & more Malays and Chinese are whispering against the bandits, although many fear Red reprisals. Templer recently uprooted 66 men, women & children from one village and put them in a detention camp for failing to inform against Communist assassins.

In the past month, 101 guerrillas were killed (including 13 party bigwigs), 18 were captured and 24 surrendered.* In the same period, the Communists killed 14 police and two British civilians. But one day last week, a Singapore paper was able to print this terse report: "Yesterday was one of the quietest days of the emergency for many months. No battles were reported. There were no murders."

*In number of Communists put out of action, it was the second best month of the four-year "emergency." Best: last June, when 151 guerrillas were killed or captured.

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