The IICCR to send Notorious Torturer Gheorghe Enoiu before Court
On 9 August 2007, the Institute for the Investigation of Communist Crimes in Romania submitted a notification to the Military Prosecutor’s Office with the High Court of Cassation and Justice, incriminating the deeds of Gheorghe Enoiu, reserve colonel, former officer within the State Security Department.
The enquiries conducted by Gheorghe Enoiu involved the use of some of the most cruel torture methods employed by the Securitate, namely seclusion, starvation, sole and testicle beating, sand bags hitting, as well as of other procedures generically known as “the vaulting-horse”, “the riding school” or “the rack”.
Gheorghe Enoiu stood out as an efficient enquirer from the early beginnings of his work. He was also a member of the team of enquirers that interrogated Lucre ţiu Pătrăşcanu, former leader of the Romanian Communist Party. Furthermore, Enoiu distinguished himself during the questioning of the students arrested in the aftermath of the youth rebellions of 1956. After 1960, he worked as an enquiring officer within the Municipal Securitate Department of Bucharest.
In agreement with the Romanian Government’s Decree No. 1 724/2005, the Institute for the Investigation of Communist Crimes in Romania is qualified to investigate and to identify the crimes, the abuses and the human rights’ violations during the communist regime in Romania, as well as to notify the state’s criminal investigation departments when such cases are discovered. Thus, the IICCR is soliciting that the former Securitate officer Gheorghe Enoiu be brought before court and also reduced to the ranks, considering the gravity of his deeds and in full accordance with the stipulations of the Penal Code. The rider of the notification comprises a number of probative elements, such as the names of seventy persons who were victims of brutal treatment, as well as four interviews that reveal the particular cruelty of Gheorghe Enoiu’s torture methods.
The IICCR’s representatives consider that an almost forty year perpetration of the grievous offences listed in the notification, aggravating circumstances considered, grounds the request of lifting the penal responsibility prescriptive term as stipulated within present legislation, namely the provisions of article 221 and the following from the Code of Penal Procedure.