Dissident Bukovsky, who exposed Soviet abuse of psychiatry, dies

Vladimir Bukovsky, a dissident and writer who helped expose the Soviet Union's abuse of psychiatry to silence critics, has died in Britain aged 76.

Bukovsky, whose health had been poor in recent years, died of cardiac arrest in a hospital in Cambridge, England on Sunday night, said the Bukovsky Center, a US-based volunteer organisation linked to the dissident.

Bukovsky spent 12 years in Soviet prisons, forced labour camps and psychiatric hospitals and was one of the first to detail the use of such places by the former Soviet Union to punish political prisoners.

In 1976, Bukovsky was deported from the USSR and exchanged in Zurich for Luis Corvalan, the imprisoned general secretary of the Communist Party of Chile.

He settled in Britain.