Former Communist secret police forced many émigrés back

Archive materials newly come to light suggest that in the hard-line 1950s the communist secret police abducted Czechs who had fled the country, smuggling them back to their homeland for years of imprisonment. At least two dozen people were forcibly brought back in this manner to face torture and show trials. One such case was the forced repatriation of the former Social Democrat deputy Bohumil Lausman in 1949. Lausman left Czechoslovakia in the wake of the 1948 coup but was brought back in 1953. He was sentenced to 17 years in prison and died under suspicious circumstances ten years later. Other kidnappings were planned but never carried out.