ROMANIA:A ROMANIAN court has ordered the defence ministry to confirm the burial place of Nicolae and Elena Ceausescu, raising the possibility that the communist dictator and his wife could be exhumed from their supposed graves in a Bucharest cemetery, writes Daniel McLaughlin
The couple's only surviving son, Valentin, has fought a legal battle with the authorities to force them to prove that the city's Ghencea cemetery is the final resting place of his parents, who were executed on Christmas Day, 1989.
Mr Ceausescu (60) took up the legal fight to discover the whereabouts of his parents' bodies in 2006. He may now request an exhumation and DNA tests on the remains.
Amid the chaos of the Romanian revolution, the much-loathed Ceausescus fled Bucharest but were captured and put on summary trial. After being found guilty of crimes against the state, they were shot dead by firing squad. Their corpses were buried at night in graves marked with false names, amid fears that they would be vandalised by Romanians who had endured grinding poverty, food shortages and international isolation under the cruel and eccentric rule of Ceausescu, who flattened much of Bucharest to erect monuments to his own glory.
Now, however, the graves are regularly covered with flowers by Romanians who feel nostalgic for the old certainties of communism, even though the defence ministry and the cemetery claim to have no record to confirm exactly where the Ceausescus were buried.