K.G.B. delays decision

Press, 10 December 1981, Page 8

K.G.B. delays decision

NZPA-Reuter Moscow The K.G.B. security police yesterday told the woman at the centre of Andrei SaI kharov’s hunger strike that it I was delaying a decision on ■* whether she can visit him in I hospital. i Liza Alexeyeva, aged 26, i said that during a 20-minute I interview with a K.G.B. i official she explained why Dr I Sakharov had called his strike and asked for permission to visit him in exile in the Urals city of Gorky. “He gave no answer but simply said the matter had not yet been resolved. I have the impression they are drawing out the matter and trying to win time, but time is something we do not have,” she told reporters. Miss Alexeyeva also said she had spoken on the telephone to Anatoly Alexandrov, the president of the Soviet Academy of Sciences. “Alexandrov said he was aware that Sakharov’s state of health was serious and that he had approached someone about the matter with a view to helping. But he did not say whom he approached,” she said. Earlier, Miss Alexeyeva was turned away from a Moscow emigration office after being summoned to discuss her request for an exit visa. The appointment had raised her hopes that Soviet authorities might be about to relent in their refusal to let her leave the country. “When I got there I was told the inspector I was to see was not there, that he was ill,” she told journalists. "The people I spoke to said they didn’t know anything about the case and didn’t tell me if I should come back.” Dr Sakharov, aged 60, and his wife, Yelena Bonner, began a hunger strike on November 22 to highlight demands that Miss Alexeyeva be allowed to emigrate to the United States to join the man she has married by proxy. The couple are now in hospital undergoing what the Russians call “preventive treatment.” Western diplomats in Moscow said the treatment of Miss Alexeyeva at the visa office suggested Soviet authorities were now uncertain on how to deal with the case. The diplomats said the hunger strike and the visa issue had become an international affair which was highly embarrassing to the Kremlin. In London, the Prime Minister (Mrs Margaret Thatcher) condemned the . Soviet Government’s treatment of Dr Sakharov and his wife, and urged it to stop harassing them.