Cambodia Rebels Reported Under Heavy Viet Shelling

Vietnamese forces poured mortar, tank, and heavy artillery fire Thursday into the Cambodian guerrilla camp at Nong Chan and rebel-held areas of Rithisen camp, rebel and Thai military sources said.

The Cambodian guerrillas also said the Vietnamese have used a type of incapacitating gas in their latest dry season offensive.

Reports reaching Aranyaprathet, a town near the border about 140 miles east of Bangkok, said the rebels tried to advance before dawn against Vietnamese positions in Rithisen, the camp the Vietnamese took Dec. 25. Resistance fighters tried to move forward under a mortar barrage but made little headway against the Vietnamese. The sources said Vietnamese artillery was called in after small arms and mortar fire failed to stop the guerrillas.

The source who reported the attack on Nong Chan said the Vietnamese apparently intended to prevent guerrillas there from heading to Rithisen, 3 1/2 miles away, as reinforcements. The Nong Chan camp, attacked last November by the Vietnamese, was the first target of this year’s campaign.

Thai military sources said five guerrillas were killed Thursday and 24 injured, while the Red Cross reported treating 48 wounded. No estimates of Vietnamese casualties were available.

About 12 miles south of Rithisen camp at Ampil, the Cambodian headquarters camp of the Khmer People’s National Liberation Front, a resistance leader charged that the Vietnamese used a suffocating gas against the guerrillas in last week’s battle to take Rithisen.

Gen. Dien Del, No. 2 man in the rebel front, said the unidentified gas temporarily incapacitated its victims.

Sam Borin, a medical corpsman for the front, said that about half the guerrillas wounded at Rithisen in recent days were stunned by the gas. Cambodian women sewed straps to thousands of gauze bandages to fashion makeshift gas masks.

The liberation front is one of two non-Communist groups fighting the Soviet-supported Vietnamese, who invaded neighboring Cambodia in late 1978 and overthrew the Chinese-backed Khmer Rouge, a Communist regime whose ruthless drive for collectivization cost the lives of an estimated 3 million Cambodians. The Khmer Rouge are now allied with the two non-Communist resistance groups fighting the Vietnamese.