Yangon  - Myanmar's military junta have summoned a known dissident for questioning to establish who had paid for his pacemaker, one of his friends said Sunday.

Win Tin, 80, who was released from prison last September after serving 19 years, was picked up by police without warning on Saturday, Maung Maung Khin said in Yangon.

The officers demanded that he provide information on who had paid for and fitted the artificial device that regulates his heart, his friend said. Win Tin was released after several hours.

Speaking after he was freed from Yangon's notorious Insein Prison, regime critic Win Tin said: "I am fighting for democracy to be restored in this country."

He is a senior member of the National League for Democracy (NLD) party of opposition leader and Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi. Suu Kyi herself has spent 13 of the past 19 years in detention and is current under house arrest.

The NLD suspects that Win Tin's latest interrogation had more to do with an article that appeared in the Washington Post, in which he dismissed the junta's planned elections in the coming year as a farce.  dpa