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| Organized Crime High on the Agenda |
| (2011-10-19) |
| Last updated: 2011-10-20 13:50 EET |
Recently, a young American basketball player was killed in a brawl in a club in the small town of Giurgiu, southern Romania. This put the authorities in a frenzy, and brought back into the public arena the issue of public safety. Unsurprisingly, the investigation revealed a whole web of shady links between a local organized crime group and the authorities, represented in this case by a member of parliament.
A week from the incident, prosecutors hadn’t managed to clarify the circumstances of the young athlete’s death. The press alleged that a blanket of silence fell on the case because witnesses were intimidated by the organized crime group in their town. This tragedy and the ensuing investigation come against the background of a debate in parliament around organized crime, which is becoming a veritable plague in Romania.
A parliamentary committee held a hearing, during which the head of the Romanian Intelligence Service, George Maior, and Minister of the Interior, Traian Igas, admitted the phenomenon gained momentum. The RIS director said that organized crime was a major threat to national security, and that the number of groups acting in this manner is growing at an alarming pace. Maior said that in the last two years his organization supplied criminal investigators with information in such cases 1,500 times, without much in the way of results.
The Minister of the Interior said that organized crime groups have to be investigated and wiped out by the state before it’s too late. In this context, Igas admitted he was dissatisfied with how the police work in various places in the country, and that the county where the American athlete was killed was one of them.
The hearings where the two testified come as part of a process in which Parliament prepares to introduce bills to change national security regulations. One of the novelties would be that national intelligence officers may be designated to conduct criminal investigations under prosecutorial supervision, as is the case in other European countries.
The opposition is critical of the bills, saying that the Romanian Intelligence Service is trying to enhance their influence as compared to other national security agencies. In fact, the opposition is constantly accusing the coalition in power that it uses state institutions such as intelligence services and the National Anticorruption Directorate as political tools.
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