Foreign News: Red Bank Bombed

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For more than a month, Paris nights had been disturbed by mysterious bomb blasts, five of them directed against Communist bookstores and propaganda headquarters. Last week the bomb-throwers blasted the front door and grillwork of the Banque Commerciale pour l'Europe du Nord, used by Moscow for its financial transactions with France, and a known reservoir for Communist Party funds.

Police were in a swivet; accusations flew thick & fast. Screamed the Soviet news agency, Tass: "French fascist groups will stop at nothing." The French Communist press roared that De Gaullists had instigated the bombings.

The night after the bombing of the Red bank, Parisians in the neighborhood were startled from their beds by another explosion which battered the first floor of Worms and Co., a hundred-year-old banking house, and blew out display windows across the street at the Printemps department store. "Someone has made a mistake," fretted a director of the Worms bank. "We have no political affiliations and certainly none with the Communist Party." Reinforced police patrols prowled Paris' financial district, watching for further bomb-throwers.