Secret Police

The man who served as chief of the secret police for Slobodan Milosevic was arrested, authorities said Saturday--a move that could signal that Yugoslavia's new leaders are preparing to arrest the former president. Rade Markovic's arrest was reported by the independent B-92 Radio and confirmed by police officials who spoke on condition of anonymity. It was not immediately clear what charges he faced. Markovic was fired last month when the new Serbian government was elected.

"Final Acts" is a mishmash of idealism and horror, sensation and sentiment, political correctness and aberrant cults. A cult is a deviant religious sect with its own form of worship; and, oh boy, are Alex Abella's cultists ferociously deviant! Girls slaughtered, skinned alive, hacked to death, heads chopped off: Blood-stained offerings to dark spirits and the credulous cuckoos who obey their demands spill out of his pages.

A special court cleared former Polish President Lech Walesa on Friday of accusations that he collaborated with Communist-era secret police after it heard evidence that fabricated documents were used in an early 1980s effort to discredit him. The allegations that the Nobel Prize winner had been an informer in his early days as a dissident shipyard worker were first made public in 1992.

A Polish court ruled Thursday that President Aleksander Kwasniewski did not work for the Communist-era secret police, freeing him to run for reelection in October. The court issued its verdict a day after hearing testimony from former officers of the secret police who disputed suggestions in old police files that Kwasniewski, an ex-Communist, worked as an agent code-named Alek in the early 1980s. "I am very pleased.

A much-criticized law designed to expose Communist-era collaborators with the secret police has ensnared both President Aleksander Kwasniewski and former President Lech Walesa in special court hearings to judge whether they were spies. Both men--who are among 12 candidates in a presidential election set for Oct. 8--vehemently deny the allegations, and in both cases, evidence so far made public appears flimsy. Hearings are scheduled for both men next week.

Humberto Gordon, 72, former junta member and ex-chief of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet's secret police. A trusted confidant of Pinochet during the dictator's rule from 1973 to 1990, Gordon had been under house arrest since October and was facing prosecution for human rights abuses. After spending years as chief of Pinochet's feared secret police, Gordon became a member of the dictator's ruling four-man junta.

Erich Mielke, the longtime head of East Germany's notorious secret police and spy apparatus, has died, a Berlin newspaper reported Thursday. The newspaper Berliner Kurier, in a report to appear in today's editions, said the 92-year-old Mielke died Monday at a Berlin home for the elderly. An official at the Berlin registrar's office confirmed that Mielke's death had been reported to the agency. Mielke headed the Ministry of State Security, known more commonly as the Stasi, for three decades.

The slush fund scandal spiraling around ex-Chancellor Helmut Kohl's Christian Democrats took another strange twist Tuesday with a report that the East German secret police kept files on the party's shady financial dealings as far back as 1976. The Berlin newspaper Der Tagesspiegel said it had found records of Stasi wiretaps of phone conversations by Kohl aides during the 1970s in which they spoke of funds in secret bank accounts.

In an attempt to reassure themselves and the public that civilians are, in fact, overseeing the Los Angeles Police Department, some City Council members said Friday that they want to be informed whenever the Police Commission makes a closed-door decision involving the inspector general. The lawmakers, who held a special meeting Friday to discuss the inspector general's authority, said they are still concerned about potential tensions between the civilian watchdog and the LAPD.

The deputy prime minister resigned Thursday after a probe was launched into whether he lied in denying collaboration with Poland's former communist secret police. Prime Minister Jerzy Buzek had earlier in the day ordered the dismissal of Janusz Tomaszewski, who also is the interior minister. Tomaszewski, considered one of the most powerful people in the almost 2-year-old government, resigned when a special court confirmed Thursday that it was investigating him.