In the first case of its kind since the end of the communist era in Romania, an appeals court in Bucharest has upheld a jail sentence against a prison commander convicted of crimes against humanity for the death of 12 political prisoners more than 50 years ago.
Alexandru Visinescu, 90, was sentenced to 20 years in jail in July last year after being found guilty of running “a regime of extermination” at the jail outside the small town of Ramnicu Sarat, 144km east of the capital, from 1956 to 1963.
The prisoners, members of Romania’s pre-war intellectual, political and military elite, were held in solitary confinement in unheated cells, subjected to regular beatings, severely underfed and denied access to medical treatment.
At least 14 of the 138 inmates who were detained at Ramnicu Sarat during the seven years Visinescu was in charge at the jail died, prosecutors said, while many more were permanently disfigured or traumatized.
The first prison commander to face trial since Romania’s former dictator Nicolae Ceauescu was executed in 1989, Visinescu, who was not in court to hear the verdict on Wednesday, has shown little remorse, insisting he was merely following orders and blaming the regime of Ceausescu’s predecessor, Gheorghe Gheroghe-Dej.
Asked six times at his appeal hearing in the High Court of Cassation last month why prisoners had died under his command, he replied just once, suggesting they had probably died of old age, before breaking down and pleading: “Let me die.”
Survivors of his regime have described being banned from sitting on their beds except at nighttime, or from approaching cell walls in case they used Morse code to communicate with each other.
The widow of General Ion Eremia, who spent 14 years in the prison, said her husband was forced to spend hours standing with his bare feet in a bucket of freezing water and left the jail weighing 30kg.
The ruling marks a significant moment in Romania’s efforts to bring to justice communist-era figures accused of wrongdoing.
Historians have said more than 600,000 dissidents — including landowners, politicians, priests, lawyers, doctors, writers, teachers and students — were jailed for crimes against the state from the late 1940s onwards. and as many as 100,000 are thought to have died in prison.
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