PRAGUE — Petr Uhl, a Czech journalist who was one of the country's leading communist-era dissidents and human rights activists, has died at 80.

His wife, former Czech ombudsman Anna Sabatova, told the CTK agency he died Wednesday. Uhl headed the national news agency in the early 1990s following the 1989 anti-communist Velvet Revolution led by the late Vaclav Havel, a fellow anti-communist dissident who became the country's president.

Known for his left-wing political views, Uhl was a high school teacher when he was first arrested in 1969 as a member of the Revolutionary Youth Movement that opposed the regime that took over the country after the 1968 Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia .