About 5:20 a. m. six Chinese made T-54 tanks rumbled up to the hotel, where they stayed for about 20 minutes. One had its cannon aimed directly at a corner of the hotel the whole time. Soon afterward, a large truck passed, its bed piled several feet deep with American-made carbines and Communist-bloc AK-model automatic rifles.
The heavy weighting of old fashioned American made weapons, from the decade of heavy American military backing for Pakistan that began in 1955, strongly suggested that some less trusted unit such as the ones with heavy Bengali enrollment had been either disarmed or relieved of its spare weapons.
Sporadic firing continued throughout the day, and at dawn, trucks with loudspeakers went through the neighborhoods shouting toward the houses. The occupants hastily scrambled onto their rooftops and hauled down the Bangladesh flags and the black mourning flags they had been displaying for the dead of earlier clashes.
The first broadcast warning of the holocaust was issued by Dacca radio in midmorning yesterday, in a terse announcement that a curfew would be in effect until further notice. An officer said later in the day that loudspeakers had been used throughout the city to warn people to stay in their houses. The night before, no such warning was witnessed during the firing near the hotel.
Mr. Bhutto and his party left the hotel about 8:30 a.m. under their accustomed heavy guard of soldiers and Punjabi civilians carrying Communist-bloc automatic rifles. Mr. Bhutto wore a gray suit and a stern countenance and said twice “I have no comment to make."
A lieutenant colonel came to the hotel in the morning, afternoon and evening and identified himself as commander of a 2 square mile area including the hotel grounds. In the after noon, he told the hotel's managements it would be permitted to have foreigners he repeated that word three times before completing the sentence swim in the pool.
About 6 p.m. correspondents in the hotel started receiving telephone calls advising that Lt. Gen. Tikka Khan, the martial law administrator, suggested that leave. Major Siddiq Salik, the military government's public relations man, told a reporter who inquired about the advisory' nature of the calls: “Some advice is obligatory."
The lieutenant colonel was asked repeatedly why the newsmen had to leave and said, after dodging the question several times: “We want you to leave because it would be too dangerous for you. It will be too bloody."
By 8 p.m. the last newsman of the more than 30 staying at the hotel was loaded into one of the four waiting Dodge army trucks but the procession waited so that the newsmen could listen to President Yahya's speech in which he announced that the Awami League had been banned and accused Sheikh Mujib of treason.
General Yahya praised........... West Pakistani soldiers in East Pakistan and said: "I am proud of them."
