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World : Ex-Soviet Rights Activist Sharansky Chosen Israeli Ambassador to U.N.

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From Times wire services

Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir has chosen former Soviet prisoner and human rights activist Natan Sharansky to be Israel’s new ambassador to the United Nations, a senior government official said today.

News of the choice raised concern among some Israeli diplomats about the possibility of offending the Soviet Union at a time when relations with Moscow, broken off more than 20 years ago, are improving.

Sharansky, 41, served nine years of a 13-year sentence in Soviet prisons and labor camps on charges of spying. He was released Feb. 11, 1986, as part of an East-West prisoner exchange and flew immediately to Israel to join his wife, Avital.

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He was arrested in 1977 after angering the Soviet authorities as an outspoken leader of the Jewish emigration movement.

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