Former political prisoner says he was beaten and given drugs

A former political prisoner has said his communist jailers used physical violence and drugs to get the admissions they wanted. Jan Janku, 88, who was jailed in the hardline 1950s, told the daily Mladá fronta Dnes that the investigator on his case beat him senseless, knocking out some of his teeth in the process, and when he failed to force from his the admission he wanted he gave him cherries injected with a drug that resulted in hallucinations, insomnia and headaches. Although historians suspected former communist prisoners were being given drugs, none of them ever publicly confirmed this to date.