Former Czech leader Havel dies

Vaclav Havel, the dissident playwright who turned to politics to help peacefully bring down communism in Czechoslovakia, has died at the age of 75.

His assistant Sabina Dancecova said Mr Havel died this morning at his weekend house in the northern Czech Republic.

Mr Havel was his country’s first democratically elected president after the non-violent “Velvet Revolution” that ended four decades of repression by a regime he ridiculed as “Absurdistan”.

As president, he oversaw the country’s bumpy transition to democracy and a free-market economy, as well its peaceful 1993 break-up into the Czech Republic and Slovakia.