Emergency procedure for bill draft on takeover of STS by Internal Affairs.
Late Monday, Prime Minister Victor Ponta criticized President Traian Basescu once more for his refusal to demote the head of the Special Telecommunications Service (STS). At a TV show on Antena 3, Ponta reiterated that the reason why the President is refusing to replace Marcel Opris as leader of STS is because he still owes a great deal to certain people for the 2009 election results and the 2012 referendum.
“I believe it’s a sign of cowardice; he’s afraid of what Opris might say about the 2009 elections and the referendum. Mr. Basescu owes a great deal to certain people – maybe even public structures – for being elected despite having lost the 2009 presidential elections. 90 percent of Romanians voted for his suspension in 2012 and criminal investigations were opened in their name (…),” Ponta said. He also accused the head of state of being a liar and behaving irrationally in his defense of the STS’s involvement in the airplane accident in Apuseni Mountains.
“The President also lied – I don’t think he knows the law – and behaved irrationally. He said something along these lines: ‘only if that was a landline phone.’ Doctor Zamfir used mobile phones and STS gave ISU the coordinates. Based on those maps made public by Basescu last night – which I’m not sure was even legal, since it was classified information, though it was better that he made them public – STS said, ‘Go to the right’ when the crash site was to the left,” the PM explained.
The PM also revealed that at Sunday’s CSAT session President Basescu accused the Government of doing more harm by setting up a Department “for” Dr. Raed Arafat. “For a quarter of an hour, the President told us how harmful the Department for Dr. Raed Arafat is. He still has personal qualms (…) Basescu has a problem with our putting Arafat in charge,” Ponta emphasized.
Bill draft regarding takeover of STS by MAI is under emergency procedure in Chamber of Deputies
The STS bill draft is scheduled to be debated on under emergency procedure in the Chamber of Deputies and it will be subject to assessment in the legislative forum’s Defense Commission, Niculae Mircovici, Chamber secretary, stated after yesterday’s National Permanent Bureau meeting. “The STS legislative initiative came yesterday. It was assigned to the Defense Commission and it will subject to debate, after which the Government and the Legislative Council must give their recommendations on the matter,” Mircovici said. “An emergency procedure was proposed and the majority of group leaders and the Permanent Bureau have approved it,” Mircovici concluded.
Another physician involved in the crash confirms coordinates were accurate
Physician Sorin Ianceu, who was injured in the crash in Apuseni Mountains and released Monday from the Emergency County Hospital in Cluj, said on air at Digi 24 that he called 112 after the crash and gave coordinates provided by Google Maps, indicating the area they were in, namely between Horea and Belis localities. According to Dr. Sorin Ianceu, his phones were destroyed in the impact, but he underlined he spoke to the 112 emergency services using his colleague Radu Zamfir’s phone and managed to convey the plane’s coordinates. “I even told them they would find us halfway on the route between Horea and Belis via road 1R. I knew the localities between which the plane had crashed. There should be a record of these conversations. We didn’t think we needed to record them as proof at the time,” the physician explained. He went on to say he had managed to communicate with pilot Adrian Iovan for an hour, an hour and a half, until the latter lost consciousness, and he emphasized that he informed the authorities about it. Ianceu claims student Aura Ion said she could no longer feel her hands and legs, so they covered her with a blanket and their own clothes, and one of the physicians set his scrubs on fire, but the girl went into cardiac arrest four and a half or five hours after the crash. “Radu Zamfir tried desperately to save her. He pumped her chest and gave her CPR for almost 40 minutes,” Ianceu continued.
STS had previously stated in a press release that “Dr. Sorin Ianceu did not call 112.” On the other hand, STS also claims physician Radu Zamfir never sent over the geographical coordinates of the crash site to 112, but “only described the surroundings and what he could see on his mobile phone,” only indicating the hour displayed by the phone as “coordinates.”
