Cable briefs

Press, 11 October 1986, Page 10

Cable briefs

Poet freed A jailed Ukrainian poet and human rights activist, Irina Ratushinskaya, has been unexpectedly released on the eve of the Iceland meeting between Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev. Keston College, which monitors religious freedom in the Eastern bloc, said Ratushinskaya, aged 32, had telephoned from Kiev to say she had been unconditionally released after serving three years of a seven-year labour camp sentence. She was also to have served five years internal exile for antiSoviet propaganda. — London. Security scare ‘ A man who tried to throw two dummy bombs at hotels being used by British Government Ministers during the Conservative Party annual conference was arrested after crashing his car into a security barrier. The police said two packages were blown up by controlled explosions and were found to contain a clock, batteries, and telephone directories. There had been stringent security for the conference since a bomb attack in Brighton two years ago, when the Prime Minister, Mrs Margaret Thatcher, narrowly escaped death after Irish guerrillas blasted her hotel. — Bournemouth. Israelis swap Jobs Shimon Peres is resigning as Israel’s Prime Minister under a power-shar-ing agreement with his Foreign Minister, Yitzhak Shamir, a hardliner in relations towards the Arab world. Mr Peres, head of the Labour Party, signed a “rotation”, agreement with Mr Shamir after an inconclusive General Election in 1984. — Tel Aviv. Ferry disaster At least 200 passengers are missing after an overcrowded river ferry sank in western Bangladesh, newspapers report. The accident occurred within a day of the publication of a report that said 426 people had been killed in Bangladesh in boat disasters this year. The International Maritime Organisation said in a report the main causes of accidents were overloading, the delapidated condition of boats, and sailing in bad weather. — Dhaka.