Romania Purges Regional Leader After Uprising

A regional Communist Party chief in Romania has been sacked along with other officials for “grave strayings from party discipline,” the Agerpres news agency reported Thursday.

The announcement came 11 days after an uprising in the Romanian city of Brasov, which was described as the most serious worker riot in Romania since 1977.

Western diplomats in the Romanian capital of Bucharest, who had expressed surprise at the uprising in the country’s second largest city, were similarly surprised Thursday by the announcement of the purge of the chief secretary of the Communist party in Dolj county in southwestern Romania.

“Announcements such as this are unusual and this is quite surprising,” said one diplomat contacted by telephone from Vienna. “It was given more prominence in the party daily Scinteia than is normal.”