We want to die together: tyrant’s wife

Press, 27 December 1989, Page 1

We want to die together: tyrant’s wife

NZPA-Reuter Bucharest THE DEPOSED Romanian President, Nicolae Ceausescu, and his wife, Elena, were jointly executed by a firing squad after she said they wanted die together without mercy, the newly formed National Salvation Front Government says. Romanian television yesterday showed a picture of the body of the Ceausescus, after their execution on Christmas Day was announced. The Ceausescus were captured on Friday in a car about 100 km from Bucharest, after attempting to flee in a helicopter that was forced to land, said Captain Mihai Lupoi, a member of the Front. The television showed two clothed bodies lying in front of a bullet-scarred brick wall. One of them was that of Ceausescu, aged 71, and the other possibly that of his wife Elena, aged 70. “We want to die together, we do not want mercy,” Captain Lupoi quoted Elena as saying before she was led out with her husband to be shot. The execution was by a threeman firing squad after a twohour secret trial by military tribunal on Monday. The couple were executed for genocide and other crimes. Captain Lupoi told journalists that as the couple were led out to the execution by the soldiers, Elena said to them: “I was like a mother to you.” “What sort of a mother were you, who killed our mothers?” one soldier replied. Romanians, who have demonstrated in their thousands against Ceausescu’s authoritarian leadership, did not react openly to the news of his execution. The streets of Bucharest resounded late into the night to the regular sound of gunfire. Army troops that have rallied to the new regime still sought to

dislodge well-armed and desperate members of Ceausescu’s elite Securitate secret police holed up in the city and sniping at their enemies. Yugoslavia’s Tanjug news agency reported that the central town of Sibiu had been destroyed in fighting. Christmas carols rang out on national radio after the execution announcement, and one announcer said: “Oh, what wonderful news on this Christmas evening. The Anti-Christ is dead.” The National Salvation Front said that the Ceausescus, toppled by a popular uprising in which the front says 60,000 people died, had been tried and shot by the Army. Bucharest television said paratroopers had helped arrest Ceausescu’s daughter, Zoia, and son, Nicu. It showed a haggard Zoia Ceausescu leaning against a wall in the garden of her grandfather’s house waving a cigarette

in her hand, and a luxuriously furnished flat in which she had lived. “Do you have room in the police truck for my poodles?” she asked before she was taken away in an armoured vehicle. The Soviet Union said it had granted de facto recognition to the front and the United States said it had established diplomatic relations with the new Government, though regretting the Ceausescu trial had not been in public. Yugoslavia also recognised the new Government. Even Stalinist Albania, the last hardline Communist State in eastern Europe, said it respected the Romanian people’s right to decide their own affairs. The official Soviet news agency, Tass, said Bucharest’s international airport had reopened, helping advance an urgent international relief campaign for thousands of wounded.

Tyrant, page 8