PRAGUE - CZECH novelist Milan Kundera made a rare public statement to deny a report that he turned in an anti-Communist spy in 1950, landing the young pilot in uranium mines and prisons for 14 years, archive documents showed.

Kundera, 79, said on Monday the charge was a set-up ahead of the Frankfurt Book Fair this week.

'This is an assassination of an author, with all its consequences,' he told news agency CTK.

'I never saw that man, I did not know him at all,' CTK quoted Kundera as saying.

'It is not true, the only mystery that I cannot explain is how my name got there,' he said.

The documents were found by Adam Hradilek from the Czech Institute for the Study of Totalitarian regimes and written up by Hradilek in Czech weekly Respekt.

Dvoracek had fled Czechoslovakia to Germany after the 1948 Communist takeover and joined a secret service run in Germany by Czech emigrees, the institute said on its website www.ustrcr.cz.

He crossed the border mountains back to Czechoslovakia on a mission in 1950. A student friend gave him shelter at a dormitory but Kundera learned of his presence and reported him.

He was arrested for treason, espionage and desertion, the institute said, and served 14 years of a 22 year sentence.

The author of novels including The Joke and The Unbearable Lightness of Being has had an icy relationship with his former homeland, writing his new works in French and even preventing some of his works from being translated into Czech.

The writer was a communist in his university years but was kicked out of the party while still there, and later turned against communism, eventually fleeing Czechoslovakia after the 1968 Soviet invasion.

He was tipped several times as a candidates for the Nobel Prize for literature.