§ 5. Mr. RONALD McNEILLasked the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs if his attention has been directed to a report given by Serbian deserters from the Bulgarian Army, in which they had 296 been forced to serve, of the savagery with which a so-called insurrectionary movement in Old Serbia was crushed last winter by the Bulgarians; whether he has official information to the effect that out of 6,000 prisoners captured by the Bulgarians 2,000 were murdered in cold blood by machine-gun fire and the remainder deported to Asia Minor; that the whole rural population of the district were removed to Bulgaria, where the men were reduced to slavery and the women and children handed over to the Turks to be taken to the Turkish Asiatic provinces; and, if so, can he say whether the German officers and troops assisted the Bulgarians in perpetrating these atrocities?
§ Lord R. CECILHis Majesty's Government continue to receive confirmation of the brutality with which the recent rising in Old Serbia was suppressed, but the details which have hitherto reached them do not show that any German officers or troops participated in these atrocities.