A Chinese girl appeared i the Second Special District Court yesterday as a plaintiff and told the story of how she was kidnapped in a village in Sungkiang last year and forced to marry a young gangster, who has been arrested by the French police together with his father also alleged to be a gang leader, and how her mother was brutally killed by the former accused by firing three shots, Although her story was denied by the accused, the judge remanded both accused in custody and hearing will be resumed on January 12.
The girl Ling Shin-hwa was one of the two girls who recently slipped away from their homes in the Concession and informed the French police that they had been forced to marry the two sons of the leader of gangsters, Li Yung-kwan, alleging that the gangster father and sons had committed all sorts of crimes in Sungkiang and become notorious in all villages there. They were charged with arson, robbery, kidnapping, and adultery.
The French police at once raided the house in Siccawei where the alleged gangsters who recently secretly arrived in Shanghai were hiding and arrested Li and one of his sons. The other son had escaped before the police arrived. In court yesterday, one of the victimized girls said that she was kidnapped by the family gang of robbers and forced to marry one of the sons named Li Chia-chou, the accused. In spring of this year when her mother tried to negotiate with him for the purpose of settling the affair, young Li was alleged' to have pushed the aged woman i a cave and shot her dead. She cri loudly when she told her mother's story.
The accused denied the story, state ing that he was employed as the man in charge of a steam launch but the girl referred the judge to villagers in Sungkiang and insisted that her story was authentic. She said that young Li used to be a salt smuggler but later became a robber victimizing numerous people under the name of a guerilla unit leader.
Mr. Sumner Welles, the acting Secretary of State, was chairman of the President's committee. The programme recommended embodies 74 specific items, among which are:
Ca-operation: in. wireless, aviation end road building; stimulation of travel from the U.S. to Latin America; training of Latin American scholars and technicians in US. government departments; distribution of U.S. government publications in Latin America; exchange of mutually informative' films; and subsidized visits of various American cultural groups to South and Central America.
A. quarter of the proposed $1,800,000 would be spent by the Department of Agriculture. The committee recommended the appointment of agricultural attaches to the American diplomatic posts at Mexico City, Havana, Rio de Janeiro and Penama.—Reuter.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.