RPT-Czech Kundera denies he denounced Western spy

                                
 (Repeats story published late on Tuesday)
                                
 PRAGUE, Oct 14 (Reuters) - Czech novelist Milan Kundera made
a rare public statement to deny a report that he turned in an
anti-Communist spy in 1950, landing the young pilot in uranium
mines and prisons for 14 years, archive documents showed.
                                
 Kundera, 79, said on Monday the charge was a set-up ahead of
the Frankfurt Book Fair this week.
                                
 "This is an assassination of an author, with all its
consequences," he told news agency CTK.
                                
 The archive shows a communist police report identifying
Kundera as the source of information that led to the arrest of
agent Miroslav Dvoracek in March 1950.
                                
 "I never saw that man, I did not know him at all," CTK
quoted Kundera as saying.
                                
 "It is not true, the only mystery that I cannot explain is
how my name got there," he said.
                                
 The documents were found by Adam Hradilek from the Czech
Institute for the Study of Totalitarian regimes and written up
by Hradilek in Czech weekly Respekt.
                                
 Dvoracek had fled Czechoslovakia to Germany after the 1948
Communist takeover and joined a secret service run in Germany by
Czech emigrees, the institute said on its website www.ustrcr.cz.
                                
 He crossed the border mountains back to Czechoslovakia on a
mission in 1950. A student friend gave him shelter at a
dormitory but Kundera learned of his presence and reported him.
                                
 He was arrested for treason, espionage and desertion, the
institute said, and served 14 years of a 22 year sentence.
                                
 The author of novels including The Joke and The Unbearable
Lightness of Being has had an icy relationship with his former
homeland, writing his new works in French and even preventing
some of his works from being translated into Czech.
                                
 The writer was a communist in his university years but was
kicked out of the party while still there, and later turned
against communism, eventually fleeing Czechoslovakia after the
1968 Soviet invasion.
                                
 He was tipped several times as a candidates for the Nobel
Prize for literature.
 (Reporting by Jan Lopatka; Editing by Louise Ireland)