THE HUNGARIAN ambassador to Bolivia has said that the Hungarian citizen arrested in the hotel where Irishman Michael Dwyer was shot dead by police last week had been beaten.
“Unfortunately they maltreated this Hungarian citizen during the arrest and you can see this on his face and other parts of his body,” ambassador Mathyas Jozsá told reporters after visiting Elod Tóasó in jail in La Paz.
Mr Tóasó (29), born in Romania’s ethnic Hungarian region of Transylvania, was detained by police along with Mario Tadic, a Bolivian man of Croatian origin on April 16th in the Hotel Las Americas in the eastern city of Santa Cruz.
During the operation, Mr Dwyer and two other men were shot dead. The ambassador said Mr Tóasó told him he heard police going into the rooms of Mr Dwyer and the other two men who were killed and opening fire.
He quickly got on the floor, face down with hands in the air. “That is how he saved his life,” said Jozsá.
Bolivia’s government claims the group was a terrorist cell linked to local extremist separatists and planned to assassinate the country’s left-wing president Evo Morales. The main opposition in Bolivia has accused the police of summarily executing the three men and using the case to try and link it with terrorism.
Mr Jozsá told reporters: “The man is far from being a terrorist, that is the information I have”.
The Irish, Croatian and Hungarian governments have expressed concern over the case and have called for an international panel to investigate.
Mr Tóasó’s lawyer says he plans to report Bolivia to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights at the Organisation of American States for excessive use of force at the time of his arrest, for not informing his family in Hungary of his detention and because of the failure of the state-appointed public prosecutor to share documentation on the case.