MISA Yoga school and Gregorian Bivolaru case: Romanian Intelligence Service abuses

On 18 March 2004 over 300 gendarmes, prosecutors, police and masked Romanian Intelligence Service agents raided simultaneously 16 buildings, private locations of yoga students, locations where tens of yoga practitioners lived in common and pursued their spiritual practice following the model of Indian
ashrams. Doors and windows were smashed to pieces, although the buildings could have been entered peacefully. The people inside were brutalized, pushed to the ground, filmed barely dressed, threatened with guns -- for hours in many cases, some of them handcuffed, although none opposed resistance. The search warrants were not presented to the locations' owners, in one location the prosecutor didn't even have a search warrant, no one was allowed to contact a lawyer, and there were no translators, although a few yoga students were foreigners. Even people passing by were stopped and interrogated.

After hours of terror almost 90 people were forcefully taken in police vans to the prosecutors' office, where they were forced to sign statements dictated by the prosecutors, under physical and mental pressure, again without being allowed to contact any lawyer. All the statements were targeted at incriminating at all costs Gregorian Bivolaru and the activities of the yoga school. Although taken by force, the prosecutors claimed these persons were heard as witnesses, and therefore the presence of a lawyer was not needed, these being one of the justifications for rejecting the complaints the victims filed later on against the prosecutors.
Huge amounts of personal belongings were confiscated during the searches, some of them without being mentioned in the search reports, and the majority having no connection with the reasons stated in the warrant. 2 years later the owners got back only one third of them. The warrants mentioned "computer data, data referring to users and to informational traffic", however the prosecutors seized several tons of various goods and documents: personal ID's, official contracts, original car and house documents, accounting documents, money, jewelry, computers (with keyboards, monitors, mouse...), video recorders, photo and video cameras, clothes, watches, underwear, shoes, food even, thousands of
books and magazines, video and audio tapes, even payphone cards, etc.

Category:

Nonprofits & Activism

Tags:

• MISA
• yoga
• Gregorian Bivolaru
• autorities abuses
• Abuzurile autoritatilor
• discriminare
• drepturile omului
• human rights
• protest
• Romanian Intelligence Service