April 2, 1959
INDIA’S DENIAL: Excerpts from an interview given by His Royal Highness Prince Petros of Greece to Kathimerini have been widely reported in the European and Western media. However, the interview has upset the Indian government, which has issued an official statement rejecting Petros’s claim that it provided the Chinese with military supplies during the occupation of Tibet in 1950. Reuters new agency quotes an Indian Foreign Ministry spokesman who has referred to Prince Petros’s seven-year sojourn in the Himalayas to study anthropology and the ethnology of tribes in India and Bhutan. It said he claimed to have seen, while in the Indian town of Kalimpong, in the Darjeeling district, lines of trucks moving from India to Tibet to supply the Chinese Army with military equipment instead of rice, as the Indians claimed. The spokesman said that these accusations were completely false and in no way based on fact. The Greek Foreign Ministry had instructed its ambassador in New Delhi to assure the Indian Foreign Ministry that the views expressed by Prince Petros were not those of the Greek government, whose relations with India have always been friendly.
