Rust’s Hopes for Early Release Dim 1 Year After Flight
A year after making his daring flight to Red Square, West German amateur pilot Mathias Rust is still grounded in Moscow’s Lefortovo Prison with apparently little hope of a quick release.
The West German Embassy said on Friday that Bonn is still pressing for a pardon for the 20-year-old flier and still hopes for a positive reply from Moscow.
But the Bonn government has made clear it is dismayed by the lack of progress on Rust, who appealed for clemency after being sentenced to four years in a labor camp for his illegal flight through Soviet airspace last May 28.
Germans in Moscow believe that the Kremlin might free him as a good-will gesture when Chancellor Helmut Kohl visits the Soviet Union in the fall.
The conservative West German daily Die Welt said Friday that Rust had more privileges than other Lefortovo inmates.
It said he is allowed to walk in the prison garden for an hour a day and buy food and cigarettes with $15 given monthly by the embassy.
He shares a cell with a Soviet prisoner who speaks English and receives German-language books on his favorite subjects--astronomy and flying, it said.
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