Romania’s longtime Communist leader Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife Elena were put against a wall and shot dead after a makeshift trial at a military unit in southern Romania 35 years ago.
The pair who ruled Romania since 1965 had been arrested three days earlier near the town of Târgovişte, 80 kilometers (50 miles) northwest of Bucharest, after dramatically fleeing the Communist Party Central Committee aboard a helicopter.
On Christmas, December 25, 1989, Romanian national broadcaster TVR announced that Elena and Nicolae Ceausescu had been tried by an Extraordinary Military Tribunal, accused of genocide and undermining the national economy, both capital offenses at the time.
The trial began at a military unit in Târgovişte at 1:20 p.m. The military tribunal, set up the day before, tried them summarily, in secret. The trial and sentencing lasted 1 hours 25 minutes.
“The two defendants committed acts incompatible with human dignity and the principles of social justice by deliberately acting discretionarily, despotically and criminally in order to destroy the Romanian people in whose name they set themselves up as leaders,” the court ruled.
At 2:45 p.m., the sentence was pronounced. They were executed in a hail of bullets five minutes later..
Shortly after, Romanian television announced Ceausescu’s death and people took to the streets to celebrate the end of the dictator and the shooting of unarmed demonstrators.
The pair were secretly buried on December 28, 1989, at the Ghencea Civil Cemetery in Bucharest.
On December 15, 1989, Romania was shaken by 10 protests that culiinated in the fall of Europe’s last communist leadership.
The protests started in Timisoara in the southwest of the country and spread to Bucharest, causing leader Ceausescu to flee on December 22.
Some 1,142 people were killed during the uprising during a crackdown on protests, more than 800 after Ceausescu’s death.
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