Romania’s interim Prosecutor General Bogdan Licu announced on Tuesday that he had asked for the criminal prosecution reopening in the Revolution file, which had been closed down last autumn. Licu said that investigations for genocide would come.
Not hearing some key persons, the lack of capitalization of some important information or the lack of post-mortem examination of several dead people are some of the grounds for which the General Prosecutor’s Office called for the case reopening.
“I ordered the reinitiating of the criminal prosecution, as the file’s closure was made based on some incomplete information. During the investigation there was no concern for establishing the basic elements for the events of December 1989,” the Prosecutor General stated.
Licu explained that, although “prosecutors conducted a high amount of proceedings in this case”, they “did not capitalize many information.”
“Prosecutors took no action to disclose the documents related to the hearings held in the senatorial committee, taken into account that thousands of hearings had been held within this committee. Despite the fact the Romanian Intelligence Service drafted a thorough document, it misses from the criminal prosecution file and there is no proof that any action had been taken to obtain this document,” the interim Prosecutor General pointed out.
At the same time, Licu argued that most of the hearings in this case had been “synthetic and formal”, while” the gunners had not been identified”, neither had the guns or the ammunition.
“The way the investigation has been pursued is not compliant with the rules of the European Court of Human Rights. Investigations for genocide are to follow for there are solid clues and because the charges of murder and aggravated murder have been prescribed,” Licu added.
Romania’s interim Prosecutor General, said in February that he would re-analyse the Revolution file, after the leader of the 21st December 1989 Association, Teodor Maries had filed a new complaint against the prosecutors’ decision to close down the case in October last year.
As a matter of fact, the Supreme Court retried the case after it had been fired off with several complaints on this topic.
In October 2015 military prosecutors from the Prosecutor’s Office upon the Supreme Court on Friday closed the 1989 Revolution file, which investigated 709 dead and 2,198 injured (1,855 shot and 924 remanded), arguing that there are previous convictions for some of the crimes in some other cases. Prosecutors established that in some cases, the death was caused “by the imprudent operation of the arms, while the victims were among those who were in the close proximity of the perpetrators.”