Romania’s top court on Thursday sensationally acquitted two Communist officials who were on trial for crimes against humanity for torturing to death dissident Gheorghe Ursu in 1985 in a ruling that was rebuked by government officials and his son.
The High Court for Cassation and Justice on Thursday rejected an appeal by Ursu’s family against the acquittal of Marin Parvulescu and Vasile Hodis who were officers of the feared Securitate secret police of late Communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu. The ruling is final.
In 2019, a lower court acquitted former Securitate chief Tudor Postelnicu post-mortem.
Justice Minister Alina Gorghiu called it „a sad day for me an ordinary citizen for which the sinister dictatorship was a sad memory that destroyed peoples’ lives, to witness the validation of any kind of repression, torture… which annihilate basic rights and freedoms.”
Ursu, an engineer, died after being beaten by interrogators and inmates on the orders of the Securitate. Before he was imprisoned, Ursu kept a diary where he was critical of the Ceausescu regime. He was arrested in Sept 1985 and died in the Jilava Prison Hospital two months later.
Alexandru Muraru, the government czar for antisemitism and keeping the memory of communism alive, called for the sentence to be overturned.
„The extraordinary ruling of the Supreme Court to acquit the Securitate officers who were investigating Gheorghe Ursu is incomprehensible and annihilates any hope that Romania will carry out justice for his murder,” he said on Facebook. „Thirty-three years after the fall of communism, there have been too few cases of Securitate being convicted for their crimes, even though people were killed.”
Son Andrei Ursu said that „dozens of testimonies and documents demonstrate that Gheorghe Ursu was systematically tortured to death in detention by his interrogator Pîrvulescu Marin, seconded by Hodiş Vasile, both officers of the VI” division of the Securitate.
The ruling came as a surprise almost 34 years since the collapse of communism. Prosecutors had asked for 25 years prison sentence for two of the former Securitate officers.
