Moscow - The head of a Russian committee on rehabilitating victims of Soviet repression was quoted yesterday as saying he was sure the Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg had been executed in the notorious Lubyanka prison.
The statement contradicted the former official Soviet line on Wallenberg, who helped thousands of Jews escape the Holocaust and disappeared in 1945 in Budapest after being arrested by Soviet troops.
In 1957 the Soviet Union publicised a doctor's note said to be from 1947 to the effect that Wallenberg had died of a heart attack that year at the age of 34 in the Lubyanka headquarters of the NKVD secret police. A Russian-Swedish committee has been set up to investigate what exactly happened to Wallenberg after his arrest.
"Now we have no doubts he was shot in the Lubyanka," Interfax news agency quoted Mr Alexander Yakovlev, head of the Presidential Commission on the Rehabilitation of Victims of Political Repression, as saying. Mr Yakovlev was considered the father of the policy of glasnost, or openness, under Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev. He said the panel had asked military prosecutors to investigate the case and was sure President Vladimir Putin would soon issue a decree rehabilitating Wallenberg.