Prague security forces accused of killing student

Press, 20 November 1989, Page 8

Prague security forces accused of killing student

NZPA-Reuter Prague Czechoslovakia’s pro-democracy movement has accused the security forces of beating a student to death when breaking up the largest anti-Government protest for 20 years.

A paratrooper pulled a mathematics student, Martin Smid, aged 20, from a crowd marching through central Prague on Friday night and security force officers began hitting him with truncheons, a Charter 77 .human rights group spokesman, Peter Uhl, said. “When he fell to the ground they hit him in the face until he was no longer recognisable,” Mr Uhl said on Saturday, quoting a friend of Mr Smid who had been present during the incident.

Police told Mr Smid's parents his death was an accident, Mr Uhl said. Students and sympathisers lit candles and placed flowers at or near the spot where, according to human-rights activists, Mr Smid died. Police and paratroopers using truncheons and teargas smashed the Friday night demonstration, leaving blood spattered on the cobbled streets of the city. The march, by 50,000 people, was the biggest protest since

widespread street disturbances in Prague in 1969 on the first anniversary of , the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact invasion which crushed the reformist drive of Alexander Dubcek. In spite of the crackdown, 2000 demonstrators staged another protest in Wenceslas Square on Saturday evening. In a further challenge to the Communist authorities, actors and theatre staff began a weeklong strike to protest against

police brutality. Czechoslovakia’s leading opposition figure, the banned playwright, Vaclav Havel, said the reported killing of. Mr Smid bore “terrible testimony” to the hardline Communist leaders’ refusal to open a dialogue with their critics. The Czechoslovak leadership condoned the Chinese Communist crackdown in June on a student pro-democracy movement which left hundreds, perhaps thousands, dead.