Six former Romanian communist officials accused of terrorism

[Crvena zvezda]

Six former Romanian communist officials accused of terrorism

07/12/2007

Researchers at a state-run institution have filed a criminal complaint against a former Securitate general and five ex-diplomats.

By Paul Ciocoiu for Southeast European Times in Bucharest -- 07/12/07
Former General Nicolae Plesita is one of the accused. [File]



Romanian state researchers filed a criminal complaint with the country's Supreme Court on November 7th against the former head of Romania's Foreign Intelligence Centre and five former Romanian diplomats, alleging they committed acts of terrorism in the 1980s.
Historians at the state-run Institute for the Investigation of Communist Crimes in Romania (IICCR) accused General Nicolae Plesita and the former diplomats -- Dan Mihoc, Constantin Ciobanu, Ion Constantin, Ioan Lupu and Ion Grecu -- of attempting to murder Romanian opposition leaders in Western Europe in 1981.
The complaint that the IICCR filed with the High Court of Cassation and Justice said the five sparked a state of fear and panic among opponents or potential opponents of the regime.
The five were suspected of terrorism as far back as 1984, when an article linking them to a letter bombing campaign was published by the German daily Die Welt.
The IICCR's charges were based on official documents, testimonies, press articles such as the one in Die Welt, and documents from the secret service archives of Romania, Hungary, the former East Germany and the United States.
After the investigation, the IICCR included the following charges in their complaint against the five men: first degree manslaughter, attempted murder, kidnapping, physical and psychological abuse, violation of the laws regarding the use of explosive materials, and the use of forgery in official documents.
As part of a bid to eliminate the regime's opponents, devices were disguised as letters and sent by mail to three well-known exiles -- Paul Goma, Nicolae Penescu and Serban Orescu. Evidence also implicates the suspects in other terrorist attacks, toxic gas assaults, and the kidnapping and assassination of other people.
Plesita is already under investigation for hiring terrorist Ilyich Ramirez Sanchez, also known as Carlos the Jackal, to murder Romanian dissidents. Among other terrorist activities, Sanchez later carried out attacks against the Free Europe radio station in Munich.
Dan Mihoc, currently head of British Petroleum Romania, refuted the allegations against him and said that as a former Securitate officer deployed at the Romanian embassy in Bonn, he only participated in economic and technical or scientific activities.
The five Romanian diplomats were declared persona non grata by the West German government in 1984, ten days after former dictator Nicolae Ceausescu visited Bonn to meet with former Chancellor Helmuth Kohl.
The IICCR was established to investigate and identify the crimes, abuses, and human rights' violations that took place during the communist regime in Romania, as well as to notify the state's criminal investigation departments when such cases are discovered.
This is the fourth accusation submitted by the IICCR to the High Court. Previously, it filed complaints against Securitate officers who recruited minors, 210 penitentiary commanders accused of genocide, and former Securitate Colonel Gheorghe Enoiu, who was accused of crimes against humanity.
Enoiu began performing interrogations with the questioning of students arrested in the aftermath of the youth rebellions of 1956. After 1960, he was assigned to the Municipal Securitate Department of Bucharest, where he employed some of the cruelest torture methods in the Securitate arsenal, including seclusion, starvation, beating prisoners' soles and hitting prisoners with sand bags, according to the IICCR.