Searchers j clear two ships in Harbour boiftb hoaxes

Sydney explosives experts cleared two ships involved In a bomb hoax yesterday — the Dutch freighter Straat Singapore and tlie Japanese freighter Nltcliu Mnru.

Six RAN divers checked the ships' hulls while, two Army bomb experts, two detectives from Uic CIB ballistics Section and 12 men from the pillage squad ami water police searched the Interior o£ the vessels. '. The captains of both ships had been radioed about the bomb threats on Saturday morning and their crews had searched the ships thoroughly. As a double check the experts from Sydney spent another two hours searching before the Straat Singapore was allowed to berth at Pyrmont and the Nitchu Marti at Walsh Bay.

On Saturday a man told Brisbane police that a bomb had possibly been planted on a ship leaving Brisbane.

He told police he had given threequarters of a pound of plastic explosive to a man at the NSW-Queensland border but was informing the police because he did not believe in what the man was doing. ' The caller said the bomber might have planted the explosive on a ship leaving Brisbane that day.

The captain of the Straat Singapore, Captain Willcm Mieog, 46, of Melbourne, ¦who had his wife, and three children aboard the ship, said he had been told the caller had first spoken normally.

After a while he had broken into an Indian accent and became slightly incoherent.

Captain Mi cog, his wife, Cita, daughters Jcannette 10, Suzanne, 8, and son Jon, six months, were ashore for dinner last night but returned to the ship later.

The two other ships which left Brisbane at the weekend, the John Burke bound for Weipa and the Kuou Maru, carrying grain to Japan, were also searched but no bomt was found. ™