Milada Horakova's prosecutor jailed for eight years

The last living prosecutor at the trial of Milada Horakova has received an eight-year prison sentence for judicial murder. Ludmila Brozova Polednova sat on the panel that condemned the democratic politician Milada Horakova to death in 1950, under the Czechoslovak Communist regime. On Thursday, a Prague court sentenced Mrs Polednova to eight years in a high security jail. Many had thought that Mrs Polednova, who is now 86, would not receive a jail sentence on grounds of her age, but the judge presiding over the case said that she had acted in contempt of the law, and should therefore go to jail. Acting as an accomplice to murder normally carries a fifteen-year jail sentence, but Mrs Polednova received a lesser sentence because of her age and, according to the judge, because of the time that had lapsed since the event. Milada Horakova was the only women ever to be executed in communist Czechoslovakia for political reasons, and was condemned following a trail that many thought was staged.