News In Brief

Afghan rebels offer to swap POWs for Sakharov freedom

A Pakistan-based Afghan resistance alliance offered Monday to release an unspecified number of Soviet prisoners in Afghanistan if Moscow freed dissident Andrei Sakharov from internal exile. The Islamic Unity of Afghan Mujahideen said the offer was in appreciation of the physicist's services in science and human rights, his denunciation of the 1979 Soviet intervention in Afghanistan, and his ''constant criticism of the tyrannical Soviet imperialist regime.''