Innocent Man’s Suicide Prompts Attack in Pravda

MOSCOW — A senior factory official in the Soviet Ukraine committed suicide after Communist officials wrongly accused him of receiving unearned income, the official Soviet newspaper Pravda said Wednesday.

It said party and judicial officials had failed to check the facts in the case of I. Vitkovsky, chief designer at a mining plant in the Marganetsk region, who committed suicide after criminal proceedings were started against him.

The region’s party leader, I. Kovalev, had been severely reprimanded and asked to resign after it became clear that Vitkovsky had been wrongly accused of renting out an apartment, the newspaper said.

The apartment was later discovered to belong to his daughter, who had not broken any law in renting it out, the party organ added.