Karel Vas - Telegraph The case against him rested on a "memorandum" that appeared to link him with British military intelligence. The document, written in broken English, was a blatant forgery yet, following months of interrogation by the OBZ (the Czech equivalent of the Soviet NKVD), Pika was sent for trial. Vas was the man chosen by the head of the OBZ, Bedrich Reicin, to act first as an investigating judge and later as a prosecutor at the trial, a combination that was technically illegal even under communism. In 2001 Vas was sentenced to seven years in prison for his role in the case and was found guilty of inserting the forged document into Pika's file that constituted the "evidence" against him. Vas's trial marked the first successful prosecution of a communist judicial official for organising the bloody Stalin-era show trials in Prague that followed the 1948 coup. Other prosecutions were hampered by the fact that the Czech justice accepts the validity of communist-era laws; thus, human rights violations can be treated as crimes only if laws that were in force at the time were broken. But even Vas's conviction was short-lived. In 2002 an appeals court cancelled the verdict on the grounds that his crimes was covered by the statute of limitations. Karel Vas was born on March 20 1916, in the city of Uzhorod in what is now Ukraine. He joined the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia aged 17 and in 1936 was sentenced to 14 days in jail for taking part in a violent demonstration. After studying Law at Charles University, Prague, in late 1939 he was ordered to emigrate to the Soviet Union. There he was immediately arrested by the NKVD and later sentenced to three years" forced labour for alleged espionage. Yet his belief in communism remained undiminished, and after his release from the gulag in 1943 he began working with the NKVD. Returning to Czechoslovakia after the war, in the late 1940s he was involved with more than 100 prosecutions in which he proposed dozens of death sentences, of which 12 were carried out. In 1951, however, he was arrested and after a year and a half in solitary confinement, was sentenced to life imprisonment on charges of treason and espionage, charges of which he was acquitted in 1956. After his release, he worked in the library of the Ministry of Justice, as a building labourer, as a clerk and later as the editor of a trade union journal. At the time of his death he was living in a retirement home in Prague. Karel Vas, born March 20 1916, died December 8 2012