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UPHEAVAL IN ROMANIA : Tyrant Gone, Romanians Dance for Joy

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ASSOCIATED PRESS WRITER

Throngs of people celebrated the downfall of Nicolae Ceausescu on Friday, dancing in the streets of this western city where thousands were reported killed a week ago in protests that spread nationwide.

Residents hurled the omnipresent portraits of Ceausescu onto bonfires that blazed around town. They fed the flames with signs ripped down from buildings that praised him and bore his platitudes on building communism.

“This is something we never expected to happen,” said resident Ingeborg Kziraska. “The dictator is gone.”

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The streets of this Transylvanian city still showed signs of the blood bath that occurred when Ceausescu’s security forces opened fire on demonstrators last weekend. Shops were burned out and official buildings heavily damaged.

Kziraska spoke outside the cathedral where she said 30 children had been gunned down.

Inside the cathedral, a memorial service was under way with about 2,000 people attending. Religious freedom--and other civil liberties--were severely curtailed under Ceausescu’s Draconian rule.

Residents estimated that between 2,000 and 4,500 people had been killed, although there was no independent way to verify those figures. Police reportedly had opened fire on crowds shouting “Bread!” and “Down with Ceausescu!”

Yugoslav media reported that soldiers and police who refused to fire on anti-government protesters in Timisoara were executed. The city itself became a symbol and its name was chanted at a huge anti-Ceausescu protest in the capital of Bucharest on Thursday.

Civilians wearing ribbons on their sleeves were attempting to maintain order in Timisoara, as people danced joyfully in the streets.

Many rode around in trucks. People waved Romanian flags with the Communist hammer and sickle cut out of the middle. Others carried banners calling for an end to repression.

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Western reporters, allowed into Romania on Friday for the first time since the unrest was reported and the Bucharest leadership sealed the country’s borders, saw that nearly every other shop in Timisoara had been gutted. Several official buildings had been devastated.

The protests in Timisoara grew out of an attempt by protesters on Dec. 15 to prevent the arrest of a Reformed Church pastor who had sought refuge in his church.

The whereabouts of the ethnic Hungarian clergyman, the Rev. Laszlo Toekes, was unknown until Friday, when Hungarian Radio reported that he was alive and was on his way to the Transylvanian city of Tirgu Mures to celebrate services.

KILLING GROUND--Mass graves have been found in a Romanian forest. A22

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