(24 Oct 2013) The Romanian prosecutor's office has charged a former commander of a Communist labour camp with genocide for allegedly being responsible for 103 deaths.
Ion Ficior, 85, was deputy commander, then commander of the Periprava labour camp from 1958 to 1963.
The camp in the remote Danube Delta village near the Black Sea held up to 2,000 prisoners.
Ficior declined to speak to reporters after he was charged on Thursday.
He told The Associated Press in an interview in June that only three or four died under his command.
The institute investigating crimes committed in the communist era asked for genocide charges to be brought.
It says prisoners died from malnutrition, beatings, lack of medicine, and from dysentery caused by drinking dirty water from the Danube.
"Both former prison commanders, Visinescu and Ficior, are in their eighties and they can no longer be incarcerated," conceded Andrei Muraru, the head of the The Institute for Investigating Crimes of Communism.
Romanian prosecutors charged another former prison commander, 87-year-old Alexandru Visinescu, with genocide for his leadership of the Ramnicu Sarat prison where Romania's elite were incarcerated.
"We want to show the difference between the totalitarian system these men served and the democratic system that will punish them for it. Regardless of the system they served, murder is murder," he said.
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