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Salient. Official Newspaper of Victoria University of Wellington Students Association. Vol 40 No. 15. July 4 1977

We haven't lost any troops honest

We haven't lost any troops honest.

Dear Sir,

I refer to your article In the June 13 issue of Salient about NZ SAS troops being captured in Malaysia.

There are of course no New Zealand troops 'militarily active in a combat zone' on the Thai-Malaysia border or anywhere else in Malaysia (or Thailand); and no New Zealand troops from any unit have been captured or otherwise gone missing. It follows that 'the parents of one of the captured men' who are reported as having written to the Ministry are an invention. To state that 'the media has been kept quiet by pressure brought to bear on journalists' is to imply that the Government or the Ministry of Defence has sought deliberately to conceal the 'capture'. The 'capture' is not fact but fiction, and any siggestion of pressure is pure fantasy. As to your 'sources high in two Government ministries', if correctly reported they were uniformed and failed to discharge their duties to the press and to the public.

There are no New Zealand troops stationed secretly in South East Asia or anywhere else. As to the reasons for the presence of troops in Singapore, these were set out by the Minister of Defence in reply to a Parliamentary Question on 22 September 1976, a copy of which is attached.

A similar letter has been sent to the Editor of 'Nexus'.

Yours faithfully.

J.J. Loftus

Deputy Secretary of Defence

GULP!