Former STB agents still working in Czech police force

The Interior Ministry has for the first time admitted that some 800 agents of the former communist secret service are still working in the country's police force. The new interior minister Ivan Langer said that he wants all former StB officers to leave the police as soon as possible. He plans to use a new civil service law which is to take effect on January 1 2007 to carry out the planned personnel changes. The former interior minister Frantisek Bublan has criticized Mr. Langer's plan saying that the people in question had been given a chance to serve the new democracy and that sacking them 17 years after the collapse of the communist regime seemed unjust.