In the Bucharest Court of Law, The Case of Dissident Ursu

Nine O’clock news – May 2000
by Ionut Coman 
Nine o'clock 
Dissident Gheorghe Ursu died because of the physical abuse he was subjected to in the Militia detention centre. This is the statement of forensics doctor Anastase Cavaliotici, who performed the autopsy on the anti-communist dissident in 1985, given to the Bucharest Court of Law.
The forensics doctor stressed that the death was subsequent to a purulent peritonitis but that the cause of the infection was not an illness which the patient might have been suffering from prior to the arrest but intestine perforations resulting from the multiple blows Ursu received in the abdominal section of his body.
Engineer Gheorghe Ursu died in 1985 while being held by the Militia for illegal possession of foreign currency but the authorities notified his family that he had died of natural causes.
After the December 1989 Revolution, Ursu's family asked the prosecutors to reinvestigate the file on the circumstances in which Gheorghe Ursu had died.
Thus, the military magistrates established that Ursu, although he had been arrested for illegal possession of foreign currency, was being investigated by the secret police (Securitate) in relation to a diary in which the engineer blamed Nicolae Ceausescu's regime for Romania's desperate situation. The diary was found by the Securitate at the institute at which the engineer was working.
The secret police transferred Marian Clita, a convict with a long history of crimes, to the Ursu's cell and ordered him to beat up and terrorize the engineer.
The Bucharest Court of Law also questioned Dan Popa, also known as "Catanga," one of the guards who had been in charge of Ursu's cell.
Popa stated that, one evening in 1985, he had heard a noise as if someone was being beaten, opened the small window on the cell door and saw Ursu almost unconscious, with his hands tied to each of the beds in the cell as if he had been crucified. Popa clearly stated that, at that point, he saw Marian Clita hitting Ursu with a stick in his testicles. "When I told him to leave Ursu alone, Clita said to mind my own business because we was carrying out an order from way above," the guard stated.
Marian Clita is standing trial for murdering Gheorghe Ursu. The judges and former officers who coordinated the activities of the Militia and Securitate in 1985 should also be on trial but they have been pardoned as military prosecutors established that they could only be charged with abuse in the line of duty.