QUEBEC THE ARMORY RAID WAS NOT UNPOPULAR .
“TORONTO, Feb, 7--= One of the piggest- aris robberies in Canadian history was pulled off in Montreal last week by six armed young men. The incident was headlined in the press and caused widespread speculation as to the identity and motives of the raiders,
They entered an armory through ¢ an ‘open door, tied up eight persons and took four mortars, four bazookas, two machine guns, 59 semi-— automatic rifles, 34 Bren guns and about 17,000 rounds of ammunition “= enough .to start a small war according to one police official.
The city police director, while stating it was: too early to speculate about the identity of the raiders, said he did not believe they were part of any organized criminal organization. He spoke re= assuringly to Montrealers who might be jittery over the possibility “of another wave of what the press refers to as “extremist terrorism,"
[Last year a series of bombings caused considerable property damage and the death of a watchman. ]
Troops have been moved in to guard the armories and the police stated that they were not ‘Sparing their own manpower in security operations, a.
La Presse, the French-language afternoon. newspaper, said it received a telephone call telling of the theft from a man who said he was a member of the Comité Revolutionaire du Quebec,
A French-language radio-station newscaster reported he had received a call from an unidentified person who told him that thirty armed men would march soon on the Bomare missile base at La Macaza, Quebec,
To date the police have made no arrests, The student council of the French-speaking University of Montreal expressed concern at police questioning of thirty students there about the raid,
Although there is no evidence to support the conclusion, the tendency is rather widespread to ascribe the raid to one of the groups of revolutionary nationalist youth which have been forming in Quebec in the past couple of years.
Last fall members of the Front de Libération Quebecois [ra] were found guilty of exploding Molotov cocktails and dynamite to call attention to the cause of independence for Quebec. After being held incommunicado for. a week, without a warrant or charge, some of them pleaded guilty. In the convictions, sentences ranged from six months to le years, -
Quebec reaction to the FLQ case and the recent armory raid is typified by the comments of Abbé Jean-Paul Tremblay at a Catholic con- ‘ference: “I. express my admiration to those 20-year-old geese fretting
behind bars, imprisoned for having committed some foolish acts because | they believed’ in French Canada. I salute their courage, and assure them that nothing is lost. On the contrary, all is assured,”
Real Couette, leader of the Social Credit party in Quebec, a rightist grouping that seeks to capitalize on nationalist aspirations, said that the action of the armory raiders was "nothing compared with the butchery of French Canadian youth conscripted during World War II.
He added: "Is not the economic context in which we are living at this moment, is not the treatment inflicted on youths, the kind of treatment that * would drive them to rise in revolt against any kind of established authority?"
Although the people of Quebec are no doubt disturbed by the death that resulted from the bombing, they support the aspirations of the youth for recognition and acceptance of the French Canadian nation and they seem pleased rather than otherwise over the success of an armory raid that mocked the army of "the English,"