Italian Marine Patrol Fired Upon from Lane; 2 Policemen Disarmed; Coolie Shot by Japanese. a firm attempt to curtail any further armed crimes on Settlement Roads surrounded by Japanese occupied territory and in particular the vicinity of Brenan Piece, P.W.D. vans were kept busy from 5 o'clock yesterday afternoon until a late hour of the svaning erecting barbed wire barricades everywhere where these territories gave access to municipal roads. Hundreds of knife-edged barbed-wire barricades were placed at all alley-entrances and smaller roads whilst with the approach of darkness police parties: commenced searching pedestrians on municipal roads in an effort to apprehend armed gangsters who have been busy in the district ever since the hostilities first move away from Shanghai.
Police parties were mainly busy along Brenan and Kinnear Roads whilst Italian troops were understood to be patrolling Jessfield Road which forms part of their defence sector)
Earlier in the afternoon, at about 340 o'clock, a small Italian patrol which had just engaged in Lane 174 Brenan Road on a routine patrol duty, is understood to have been üred upon from a house, Immediately reinforcements were rushed up and thrown around the lane, a number of Italian officers and officials from Bubbling Well Police statiomesearching for suspects in the various houses and attempting to find the used cartridge case. Whilst this was not found, at least one suspect who had been running in one of the alleyways when the patrol consisting of an officer and four men, was passing, was apprehended and is at present being questioned. He claims to be a workman in one of the factories in the lane and is understood to have told investigating officers that he knew nothing.
A high police official questioned in the later part of the afternoon, with regard to the increase in armed crime in the vicinity of Nrenan Piece, said that the police were taking an increasingly serious view of the situation as between 30 and 40 armed robberies had been committed within the last month as compared to the three or four that were the average there prior to hostilities, "In view of the fact, however, that the territories do not fall under the jurisdiction of the Council, the police were, only in a position to patrol the extra-Settlement roads which give only very limited scope for their work.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.