Kevin Ruane

Former BBC News correspondent Kevin Ruane has died, at the age of 86.

I knew him first as Foreign Duty Editor in the Broadcasting House newsroom in the early seventies; before I arrived (in 1973) he'd been a regular producer of From Our Own Correspondent. He also presented weekly round-ups of the foreign press (via BBC Monitoring) on Radio 3. He was radio's man in Moscow for three years from 1977, came back and presented Six Continents on Radio 3 (using clips from foreign radio brodcasts), and then, most significantly, Eastern Europe Correspondent from 1980 to 1986.

He was based in Warsaw for the rise of Solidarity, and wrote the definitive book, "To Kill a Priest" about Father Jerzy Popieluszko, a young parish priest in a Warsaw suburb who spoke out against the abuses of communism and supported Solidarity, banned under martial law. Popieluszko was abducted by secret police in October 1984;  his savagely-beaten body was found 11 days later in an icy reservoir. For the first time, a communist government was forced to try to condemn the actions of its own security agents - it proved to be a decisive crack in Eastern Bloc Communism.

The book got reviewed by no less than Lech Walesa "Everyone who would like to find out how communism was finally defeated should read this profound and well-documented book."

Kevin himself was bounced out of Poland by the authorities in 1983, who'd been upset by an edition of Panorama on the Polish military crackdown of 1981, and he had to do much of his reporting from outside the country, and sometimes from the UK.  He picked up good material from BBC Monitoring in Caversham - his first BBC job was with them - and, back in the family home in nearby Reading, with wife Beryl, son Vincent and daughter Frances, he relished rounds of golf with a neat handicap of 6.

But work in Moscow and Warsaw gave Kevin a new partner, Clare Birgin, working for the Australian Embassy, later to become a full Ambassador in a succession of European capitals, and he died in Canberra.

•