Jan Patočka died of a heart attack on 13 March 1977, after lengthy StB interrogation

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Jan Patočka, the Czech phenomenologist and one of Charter 77's three original spokesmen alongside Václav Havel and Jiří Hájek, died of a heart attack on 13 March 1977, aged 69 — weeks after Charter 77's January 1977 publication. Per Radio Prague International's 2007 retrospective, the death came "after lengthy interrogations by the StB secret police," Czechoslovakia's secret police. The same retrospective describes him as "a moral and intellectual authority behind the Charter 77 protest movement - and the signatory who paid the most dearly, with his life," a death arriving during the same crackdown climate that traces back to the 1976 Plastic People of the Universe trial Havel names as the document's actual founding catalyst.

The specific date and age given here rest on a single secondary retrospective published thirty years after the fact, not on a contemporaneous 1977 report or a primary document — see the [unverified-quant] flag.