Dr Brych alleges family threatened

Press, Volume CXV, Issue 33804, 29 March 1975, Page 2

Dr Brych alleges family threatened

(New Zealand Press Association)

AUCKLAND, March 28.

The Auckland cancer therapist, Dr Milan Brs ch, alleges that the New Zealand Government is not givmg him the protection he needs from “Czech agents, and has moved his family to another country.

“Usually a Government gives you protection once you are a citizen of the country’. New Zealand will not. After seven years hard work here, 1 may have to leave,” said Dr Brych.

He had left his wife, 18-month-old daughter, and three-month-old son in an overseas country where the authorities had agreed to protect him.

This followed threats from the “Czech authorities,” against their safety, he said. The Security Intelligence Service today confirmed that earlier this year Dr Brych approached it saying he feared reprisals from Czech agents.

A spokesman for the service said that Dr Brych had not expressed concern about the safety of his wife and children, but had said he had reason to believe that agents were “after him.”

The spokesman said that Dr Brych’s personal safety

was an issue for the police, not the Security Service. 1 Dr Brych is confident that experts he will bring from overseas to testify on his behalf in the registration issue will win the case for him. No date has yet been set for the resumed hearing. He would bring to New Zealand to testify, among others, Dr Ladislav Bittman, who was deputy head of the information department of the Ministry of the Interior in Czechslovakia before he went to the United States, said Dr Brych. Dr Bittman had recently had a book published called “The Deception Game,” which exposed how the Czechoslovakian Government worked to discredit persons overseas. He was now teaching law in the United States. ‘Cleared by U.N.’ Dr Brych said that before coming to New Zealand seven years ago, the United Nations investigated his background, and issued him with a certificate as a political refugee. He was also given a Nanson passport, which entitled him to travel to any country that was a member of the United Nations, without a visa.

“In 1968, I went to a New Zealand diplomat in Rome, who told me that if I came to New Zealand, I would be protected from the comrpunist intelligence service. There had been a move to kidnap me by Communists in Italy, so I decided to get out of Europe.” He said that he had found two Russian agents were travelling with him on the aircraft to New Zealand. He advised the Australian authorities. and the agents were taken back to Australia after the airliner landed in Auckland. The incident had been reported in newspapers at the time.

Later New Zealand doctors became jealous, said Dr Brych. When he spoke of bringing two doctors from overseas to establish an oncology centre, they set out to get him struck off the medical register. N.Z. citizen In the meantime, he had become a New Zealand citizen. He was given temporary medical registration when he came to the country, but afterwards sat examinations and carried out practical surgical work, and in 1972 was given full recognition as a medical practitioner. He accused New Zealand medical men of breaking the Genvea Convention by com-

munciating his name, photograph, and whereabouts to the Czech authorities.

The Czech authorities then asserted that he was unknown to them, and this led to his being crossed off the New Zealand register, he said. One Auckland doctor had gone to Czechoslovakia with photographs and details of Dr Brych’s family, and given these to the authorities, and he now admitted this in an affidavit filed in the Supreme Court. Telephone warning “As a result of this, I received a warning over the telephone from someone speaking in Czech that if I should go ahead and prove my credentials, I would cause damage by discrediting the Czechoslovakian authorities who have denied my claims.

“Later, when it became known that I had been around the world collecting evidence, I was rung up again, and told that since I had two children and a wife I was a fool to jeopardise them. “The caller said the Czechoslovakian authorities would offer me financial help to get .out of New Zealand, as they didn’t want to liquidate me. The caller spoke in Russian. “I told him I couldn’t withdraw at this stage. Then he rang my wife and urged her to influence me.” Dr Brych said that he had decided to make public the threats against him because he believed this would deter communist agents from trying to put their threats into effect.

Dr Brych said that in South Africa and South America it was illegal to pass on the name of a political refugee to a communist country. “I came to New Zealand seven years ago, and after seven years hard work, I am ruined financially, with four trips overseas to prove my credentials and a $4OOO bill for overseas telephone calls. “I am having my practice interrupted by these trips, my nerves ruined, and I will probably be forced to leave New Zealand,” he said.