The last chief of the communist Czechoslovak secret police (StB), General Alojz Lorenc, is to stand trial before a Slovak military court.

More than 10 years after the StB was dissolved, Lorenc will face charges of being responsible for the arrests of some 300 dissidents and opponents of the totalitarian regime in 1988-89, as well as destroying a large number of secret documents. Lorenc, accused of abuse of power after the fall of the communist regime and sentenced to four years in prison in October 1992, took advantage of the division of the former Czechoslovakia after the sentence was confirmed on appeal in May 1993 to take refuge in Bratislava, capital of newly-independent Slovakia. In 1994 the Czech police were refused leave by Interpol to issue an international arrest warrant due to the "political nature" of the matter and from 1995 to 1998 Lorenc benefited from a judicial void preventing his extradition to the Czech Republic. Only in May 1999 several months after the new government of Prime Minister Mikulas Dzurinda took power did Slovakia say it was prepared to move against him. In his defence, Lorenc said: "In line with my job, I took certain responsibilities, and under the law I was bound to carry them out."