Attila Csorba injured his better eye in October 2006. He committed suicide in 2013 after he couldn't bear the pain caused by his brain and eye injuries. He is one of the dead victims of the 2006 police state violence, said Tamás Gaudi-Nagy in an interview with Magyar Nemzet.
Recalling the brutal mass dispersal 15 years ago, the lawyer of the National Legal Protection Service said that the responsibility of Ferenc Gyurcsány was clear after the former Prime Minister - according to his own admission - was there in the police operational control center on October 23. Details from the interview.
- Where were you on September 17, 2006, when Ferenc Gyurcsány's Ószöd speech was leaked?
- At my law office, I learned about Gyurcsány's outrageous speech, in which he admitted to hundreds of tricks and that they essentially committed election fraud, as they had lied about the country's near-bankruptcy situation before the spring election. And when the spontaneous protests began, I was sure: it was only a matter of time before the police in the capital, which had already been controlled by Péter Gergényi for years, would strike.
When the MSZP-SZDSZ came to power in 2002, we were already over the legal battles due to the violent and illegal dispersal of many peaceful anti-government demonstrations, the arbitrary detention of the participants according to the schedule, and the subsequent subjection to conceptual proceedings. The police state methods of the fall of 2006 - with a Bolshevik mentality - were therefore already used years before by the government at that time against dissenters, and the left-liberal government continued this with increasingly harsh methods even after 2006.
"When did you learn about the first police brutalities?"
- On the evening of the siege against MTV's headquarters and the following morning, we already received reports on behalf of the victims of police violence. Witnesses, friends and desperate parents asked for protection for those in trouble. And the next evening, all hell broke loose, when the crowd marching from Kossuth square in front of the MSZP headquarters, demanding Gyurcsány's resignation and the departure of the government, was attacked on Köztászárógá square with a horse attack and riot police with police dogs. Let's not forget that Gyurcsány ordered the leaders of the police, whom he pushed aside because of the TV siege, to the Parliament that morning and demanded tough action. The police fulfilled the expectation. A young man was shot in the head with a tear gas grenade right next to me on Blaha Lujza square, and we took him to the ambulance in an unconscious state.
The police became increasingly brutal, and manhunts began at dawn. Everyone was beaten indiscriminately, the arrested were first dragged to the courtyard of the Magyar Rádió in Ávós, which had been turned into a torture chamber and concentration camp, and from there to police custody.
Many of them were subjected to humiliation, torture and inhumane treatment, forced interrogations that lasted until dawn. The capital's jails were filled with intimidated, mostly injured young people deprived of the right to protection, whose loved ones did not know anything about them for days. The manhunt continued the next day, that is, on the night of September 20 to 21.
It happened that vans without police signs drove around the city, and police officers without identification jumped out of them and attacked young people on their way home from a party. Two hundred young people were placed in pre-trial detention in the first instance, and suffered terrible ordeals during detention.
– Police brutality only intensified on October 23, all hell broke loose in Budapest.
- The destructive operation of the terrorist machine really reached its peak on October 23.
Along with me, many people would not have thought that after the series of cruel attacks against protesting groups and lone passers-by in September, the largest opposition party, Fidesz, organized for the 50th anniversary of the 1956 freedom struggle, and the Kossuth Square protesters would also be targeted. They deployed an unprecedented amount of police force, used extremely dangerous, destructive, and also non-regulated hunting weapons, and fired thousands of rubber bullets and tear gas grenades at head height without any legal basis. In the struggle that developed here, there were several people who suffered serious injuries from viper and tuna blows, tear gas, and blatantly violent police kicking and abuse.
By the way, the deepest pits of hell opened up at Erzsébet tér, where, in addition to a coordinated attack by police vehicles with water cannons, a minute after the end of the Fidesz commemoration, they ordered a sword-bladed horse attack on families with strollers and small children, elderly people and basically peaceful citizens.
They attacked people in a brutal manner with tear gas grenades fired at head height and thousands of rubber bullets also fired at head and neck height, violating all legal regulations. They broke into several restaurants and beat everyone, a blind man who had been chased out was shot twice in the back at close range with two-centimeter rubber bullet ammunition. They carried out a team power struggle against the participants of the commemoration held at Astoria, as well as against the peaceful anti-government demonstrators who, as later determined by the court, were illegally pushed out in the early hours of the 23rd so that Ferenc Gyurcsány and his government could "celebrate" freely, without the people. the struggle for freedom drowned in blood by his intellectual predecessors with the participation of many foreign heads of state and government.
"Did the police act on Gyurcsány's orders?"
- Former national police chief László Bene told our 2006 investigation committee that Gyurcsány specifically asked him to do everything so that he could "celebrate" safely and calmly. The plan was far exceeded.
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Photo: Zoltán Havran
