The Bodies

After their coup, South Viet Nam's rebels announced that President Ngo Dinh Diem and his brother, Ngo Dinh Nhu, were killed in an armored car when Nhu scuffled with an army captain over a gun. Hardly anyone believed that story. According to a likelier version, the brothers were taken to Joint General Staff Headquarters; Diem refused to announce his resignation and Nhu started cursing--whereupon one of the generals pulled his gun and shot them. In any case, the new government to this day terms their deaths "accidental suicide."

Since then, the Saigon press corps has been given glimpses of photographs purporting to show the brothers in death, by a mysterious, elusive little man who offered to sell copies to the highest bidder, but then invariably disappeared. Last week United Press International finally acquired two such pictures from an unidentified source. In the photographs the brothers hardly look like suicide victims, accidental or otherwise. Both are still wearing the Roman Catholic priests' robes in which they attempted to escape after their regime caved in; their faces are bloodied and bruised, Nhu's hands tied behind his back (see cut).

Still a mystery is the whereabouts of the bodies. Fortnight ago, a picture peddler appeared again, this time exhibiting photographs of two coffins, marked Ngo Dinh Diem and Ngo Dinh Nhu, on trestles, with an unidentified army officer standing near by. Other prints showed the coffins, decorated with flowers and candles, beside two freshly dug graves, and a European priest in the foreground along with a Vietnamese man and woman said to be Diem relatives. The site was said to be a cemetery within the compound of Joint General Staff Headquarters.

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