Romanian president to inspect handover of police files
Romanian president Traian Basescu was to visit a warehouse today where millions of files of the former Communist secret police, the Securitate, were being held following their handover to a national archive.
About two million files have been transferred since April, the Romanian Intelligence Service said.
The files, which are held in a warehouse south of Bucharest, stretch for 60,000 feet.
Romania’s Securitate obsessively spied on the country’s 23 million citizens.
There were estimated to be 700,000 informers, some as young as nine, when former dictator Nicolae Ceausescu was overthrown in December 1989.
The files are now under the control of the National Council for Study of the Securitate Archives, the body which is responsible for studying and publishing findings from the files.
Basescu’s office said he would visit the warehouse where the files were being stored later today.
In recent months, Romania has begun to finally open its files, which have revealed that politicians, journalists and other public figures collaborated with the dreaded Securitate.
The handover was part of the centrist government’s efforts to distance itself from the communist era.
