Short answers, pulled from the story.
The Malayan Emergency began on the 17th of June 1948 during the Sungai Siput incident when three European plantation managers were killed by communist militants. This event provided a pretext for British colonial authorities to arrest or kill communist and trade union leaders, forcing many activists into hiding.
Chin Peng led the remaining Malayan communists to form the Malayan National Liberation Army on the 1st of February 1949. The MNLA was partly a re-formation of the Malayan Peoples Anti-Japanese Army which had been disbanded in December 1945 but kept weapons hidden in jungle hideouts.
Six hundred concentration camps known as new villages were created during the Malayan Emergency to segregate civilians from guerrilla activity. These camps were surrounded by barbed wire and police posts to prevent inmates from supplying food to MNLA fighters in the jungles.
Twenty-four unarmed civilians were executed by the Scots Guards near a rubber plantation at Sungai Rimoh near Batang Kali in Selangor in December 1948. All victims were male ranging from young teenage boys to elderly men and their village was burned to the ground without any weapons being found.
British and Commonwealth forces hired over 1,000 Iban mercenaries from Borneo to act as jungle trackers who decapitated suspected MNLA members for identification purposes. Authorities permitted these Iban headhunters to keep scalps of corpses as trophies until Winston Churchill banned the practice in April 1952 following public exposure.
The Malayan government declared the state of emergency over on the 31st of July 1960 after the last serious resistance ended with an MNLA surrender in 1958. Chin Peng subsequently left south Thailand for Beijing where he was accommodated by Chinese authorities in the International Liaison Bureau.