Defector

The CIA on Monday denied mishandling a Soviet defector and said he's free to go if he doesn't like it here. In a rare public statement, the agency said it "welcomes an inquiry by the intelligence committees in Congress" into its handling of Victor Gundarev, 49, former security chief of the Soviet Embassy in Athens. According to an article Sunday by David Wise on the op-ed page of the New York Times, Gundarev defected from the KGB in 1986.

The Buffalo Sabres announced that Alexander Mogilny, who became the first Soviet hockey player to defect to the United States last May, will not be in the Sabres lineup for tonight's game against the touring Moscow Dynamo team. General Manager Gerry Meehan said NHL President John Ziegler asked the team to not play Mogilny, who left the Soviet national team after it won the World Championship in Sweden last April, "to avoid possible embarrassment."

Petr Nedved, who defected from Czechoslovakia during a Christmas hockey tournament in Canada, has signed a contract with the Seattle Thunderbirds, the Western Hockey League team announced. Terms were not disclosed. Nedved, 17, left the Litvinov midget team Jan. 2 during a minor hockey tournament in Calgary. The center was the leading scorer in the tournament and selected to the first all-star team. The 6-foot, 3-inch, 170-pound Nedved is a native of Liberac, Czechoslovakia.

The highest-ranking Soviet official to defect to the United States collapsed during a speech and was reported in fair condition Thursday at a hospital. Arkady N. Shevchenko, who was undersecretary general at the United Nations for the Soviet Union from 1973 to 1978, was taken to St. Vincent's Medical Center after becoming ill Wednesday night during a talk at the Florida Community College here.

A man demanding to be taken to the United States today hijacked a Soviet airliner with 60 people on board and threatened to blow it up, authorities said. He later surrendered and sought political asylum. The 55 passengers and five crew members safely left the aircraft, parked beside a runway at Helsinki airport and surrounded by police. The hijacker gave up an hour later after talks with Finnish officials through a cabin door of the twin-jet Tupolev 134.

A Cuban who had sought and received political asylum in Spain with his wife, the prima ballerina of the Cuban National Ballet, has turned himself in to the Cuban Embassy in Madrid, embassy sources said today. Alfredo Rodriguez, lighting designer for the ballet company, and his wife, Dagmar Moradillo, had asked for refuge in Madrid last week after a performance in Majorca. The couple had planned to settle in Miami, where they have family.

An Estonian refugee, on trial in the killing of a North Hollywood woman who had befriended him, repeatedly stabbed her and later struck her on the head with a hatchet "just to make sure" she was dead, a prosecutor said Monday. Peter Sakarias, 24, is charged with murder in the July, 1988, slaying of Viivi Piirisild, 52, with the special circumstance that the killing occurred during the burglary of her home. He may face the death penalty if convicted.

A senior Chinese intelligence officer, reported by foreign news agencies this week to have defected to the West, is the source who tipped the United States last fall to the 33-year espionage career of CIA turncoat Larry Wu-tai Chin, according to a government official familiar with the case. Yu Zhensan, once head of the foreign affairs bureau of China's Ministry of State Security, was spirited to the United States "within a couple of weeks, one way or the other," of Chin's arrest last Nov.

Two former leaders of the Khmer Rouge headed back to an area controlled by former guerrillas today, but the Cambodian government denied it was letting men accused of genocide slip from its grasp. Chan Kosal, police chief in the northwestern town of Battambang, said Khieu Samphan and Nuon Chea left Battambang by military helicopter for the town of Pailin after six days of VIP treatment by the government, which angered human rights groups and many Cambodians.

German diplomats negotiated with China over the fate of 15 North Koreans holed up in a German government-run school in Beijing, the German Embassy said. The 15, who jumped a wall to enter the school compound Tuesday afternoon, spent the night in the school building and were provided with blankets, water and food, an embassy spokesman said, speaking on condition of anonymity. He would not say whether the group had asked for asylum.