COMILLA, Pakistan, July 29 —A Danish agricultural mission, here, the last foreign advisory team stationed in the field in East Pakistan, is considering ending its mission because of shelling and a paralyzing atmosphere of fear.
Comilla, which is six miles from the Indian border, is a battleground between the Pakistani Army on one hand and the Bengali separatist guerrillas and Indians on the other.
An important district capital with 100,000 residents, Comilla has been shelled twice in the last two weeks and people here say that, in the attack on Mon day, a dozen were killed and about 30 others wounded.
“We would like to continue our work here but we are not being paid to risk our lives,” a Danish dairy expert said. The expert, Kund Klausen Kristensen, has worked here for the last year and a half as a representative of the Danish Inter national Development Agency.
Farm Cooperative Created
In cooperation with the Pakistan Government, the Danish team created a farm cooperative with 1,200 members, a model creamery, cold ‐ storage facilities and tractors, as well as an agency for farm credit.
“Two of our four Danes have left,” Mr. Kristensen said. “At this point most of our local people are too frightened to go out into the countryside. We have a milk‐truck driver who is still working although he's had one bullet through his truck.”
The immediate new problem, Mr. Kristensen said, is the shelling of the city, although in the last few weeks Mr. Kristensen's vehicle has been repeatedly shelled on the road.
“South of here on the road to Fenny,” he said,” the road comes within a few hundred yards of the Indian border. You can see India quite clearly because Pakistan is flat at this point while India rises in hills past the border.
“About two weeks ago I had a flat tire and stopped near bridge. While we were trying to get it fixed a mortar on the Indian side opened up on us— we could see it—and shells started landing. Luckily they didn't hit anything.”
On other occasions, Mr. Kristensen said, he saw Indian gunners firing at buses and other civilian vehicles along the Fenny road but ignoring army trucks.
“If they are trying to win the support of local civilians it certainly seems the wrong way to go about it,” he said.
But the shells striking Comilla itself, which is about 60 miles from the province capital of Dacca, have apparently not all been fired from across the Indian border.
Large, shells, apparently from howitzers, landed this week in the vicinity of Comilla airport, the army's vital link to the town from Dacca. These were presumably fired from across the border.
But the most serious casualties caused by shelling on Monday were at a corner market stall when a mortar shell hit the corrugated iron roof of the building.
Although five persons were said to have been killed by the shell, the hole in the roof was only about three feet in diameter, indicating that the shell was of small caliber, possibly 61‐mm. Such a mortar could not be fired from six miles away, the distance to the Indian border.
‘It Could Be Anyone’
“I don't know who is firing shells,” one city resident said, “it could be anyone. Some say it is the army itself. But we have no protection and naturally we are frightened. Some wanted to put sandbags on roofs, but the army won't let us because they say such fortifications could be used by the Mukti Bahini [Bengali guerrillas].”
Army patrols are constantly in the streets and a curfew is rigidly enforced.
But the vast jute and rice fields of Comilla district are flooded by monsoon rains and look like gigantic lakes. The army, reliant on trucks, will be circumscribed throughout the monsoon season.
“The Mukti Bahini have said they will carry out their offensive during the monsoon. I think there will be a lot of bloodshed in the next two months,” a storekeeper said.
The hamlets and fields be tween Dacca and Comilla look peaceful and normal, apart from the bridges that were dynamited by Bengali rebels last April and still have not been repaired. But people seem to feel some thing in the wind.