The World - News from May 23, 1989

A top Communist Party official with links to two controversial criminal investigators has been cleared of bribery charges because of a lack of evidence and released from custody, the Tass news agency said. Viktor I. Smirnov, former second-ranking party official in the Moldavian republic, was charged Jan. 11 with taking bribes. Tass said prosecutors “apologized to Smirnov for the serious violations of socialist legality with regard to him on the part of officials from the prosecutor’s office.”