The World - News from April 17, 1988

Soviet police have been sent to patrol the 18-mile evacuation zone around the Chernobyl nuclear power plant following the theft of radioactive paintings from abandoned villages and the return of about 100 mostly elderly people to their homes, the official news agency Tass reported. Radiation levels in the area are still above normal almost two years after the April 26, 1986, accident at the Chernobyl No. 4 reactor, but Tass quoted Alexei Demchenyuk, deputy head of the interior department of the Kiev region, as saying, “We do not have either a moral or legal right today to force them (the elderly returnees) to leave the zone.� Demchenyuk said also that some people had tried to smuggle 17th- and 18th-Century icons out of the region.