Oswaldo Paya, a Cuban dissident and Nobel Peace Prize nominee, died Sunday in a car crash when the vehicle he was riding in veered off the road and hit a tree, a hospital official confirmed to NBC News. The 60-year-old leader of the Christian Liberation Movement was traveling in eastern Granma province at the time of the accident, which killed another dissident and injured a Spaniard and Swede. Paya, a medical equipment engineer, built Cuba's first nationwide opposition initiative and emerged as the leading advocate of peaceful democratic change in Communist-run Cuba. He was nominated twice for the Nobel Peace Prize, and in 2002 he received the Sakharov Prize, the European Union's top human rights award named after the late Soviet dissident Andrei Sakharov.
