Arabs Slaughter 5 Jews in Raid on Colony; Raze Huts, Wreck Synagogue

Six Jews and a British officer were killed in a renewed outburst of terrorism last night and early this morning which punctuated a brief interlude of comparative peace in the holy. Land.

Five Jews were killed when a band of more than 150 Arabs launched a savage attack against the isolated colony of Kiryat Haroshet, Near Yagur, south of Haifa. The colony, unfenced, exposed, and dominated by terrorist-infested hills, consists of a straggling line of widely separated huts.

The attack began at 11.15 o’clock last night, with Jewish ghaffirs (special policemen) returning the Arab fire until their ammunition was exhausted and they were forced to retreat. The Arab raiders then entered the colony, looted a school house, defiled and wrecked the synagogue and smashed their way into one of the huts, killing its three occupants, putting the hut to the torch and cremating the corpses. The victims were Samuel Guterman, 38, who came to Palestine from Rumania four years ago; his wife, Lottie, 36, and their daughter, Bila, 18 months.

The ghaffirs launched a counter attack by the light of the blaze, but were unable to prevent the capture of a second hut, where the Arabs killed Mrs. Regina Stiegler, 33, and her son, Jacob, 12. This hut too was burned to the ground. Mrs. Stiegler’s six-year-old daughter hid during the attack and managed to escape. Her husband was absent at the time of the raid.

The Arabs smashed the doors of three other shacks in the colony but were driven off by shots from within. Reinforcements of ghaffirs from nearby colonies arrived and routed the terrorists after an engagement lasting four hours, during which the Arabs sustained several casualties. The corpse of one Arab was abandoned and trails of blood indicated that at least seven other casualties had been inflicted. This morning a company of 100 British soldiers arrived with donkeys to trail the terrorists into the surrounding hills.

A Government physician who examined the bodies of the victims declared they had all been killed before their homes were burned. All were buried on the sites of their razed huts.

In Haifa last night an Arab constable shot and fatally wounded Abel Plaut, a Jewish carpenter, who had refused to obey a command to halt. Plaut, 38, who came here three years ago from Germany, was carrying a thermos bottle in the Customs House when Arabs pointed him out to police and charged the bottle was a bomb. Misunderstanding the constable’s order, Plaut, frightened, took to his heels and was shot.

Arab terrorists ambushed a Royal Scots patrol between Tulkarem and Kalkillia, killing Sgt.-Major Beauchamp. A soldier was slightly wounded in an earlier ambuscade.

Terrorists put to the torch 75 acres of crops owned by a Jewish farmer near Beth Gan, in the Lower Galilee. The crops were completely destroyed. A battle between troops and terrorists in the vicinity of Beisan ended inconclusively at dusk yesterday. The action began when the troops were attacked during a search of the village of Manada. Thirty-one Arabs arrested during the search escaped during the battle. No casualties were reported among the soldiers. An Arab with a bomb in his possession was arrested last night in a market place in the center of Tel Aviv.