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Police have arrested two Slovak men as they attempted to sell a large amount of radioactive material in a Brno hotel. The two, from the Slovak town of Presov, were detained in a sting operation at Brno's Voronez hotel while trying to sell three kilograms of the material, which has not yet been identified. The National Institute for Nuclear Safety says it was the largest seizure of radioactive material anywhere in the world for the last nine months. The head of the Institute, Dana Drabova, said it was almost certain that the material could not have been used for the production of nuclear weapons. She said the material was most probably low-grade uranium smuggled from the former Soviet bloc.

After police found a bugging device in the car of Social Democrat MP Josef Hojdar on Monday, Mr Hojdar called on Prime Minister Spidla and the ministers of the interior, justice and defence to look into the matter. The Czech counter-intelligence service, the BIS, has meanwhile denied playing any role in the matter. Mr Hojdar made the headlines earlier this year when he temporarily left the governing Social Democrats' group in the Chamber of Deputies, threatening the government's majority. Claims the MP made in the summer that he had been bugged and followed were not proven.

Both Interior Minister Stanislav Gross and Defence Minister Miroslav Kostelka have already appeared before the parliamentary commission to explain that neither the police nor military secret intelligence played any role in the bugging of MP Jaroslav Hojdar's car. Late Wednesday both men confirmed that the type of bugging device that had been found was not used by either service.

Spokeswoman Anna Veverkova has revealed that the Czech cabinet has swept aside an opposition proposal calling for compensation for victims of the

Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. The proposal, put forward by the opposition Civic Democrats, will still, however, be debated in parliament. The Civic Democrats would like to see those who suffered under the occupation, which effectively lasted from 1968 till 1991, receive remuneration as high as millions of crowns, especially in cases where a family member was wounded, raped, or killed. To this day the complete number of victims who suffered or were killed under the occupation remains unknown.