Ceausescus’ Last Request : ‘We Want to Die Together. . .We Want No Mercy’ : 3 Lottery Winners Get to Kill Them

Deposed Romanian President Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife, Elena, were executed by a firing squad after she said they wanted to die together without mercy, a National Salvation Front member said today.

Romanian television showed two bodies and a close-up of the dead dictator today, a day after the couple’s execution. (Photo, P2)

The Ceausescus were captured Friday in a car about 60 miles from Bucharest after trying to flee in a helicopter that was forced to land, said Capt. Mihai Lupoi, a member of the Front, which is acting as an interim government.

“We want to die together. We do not want mercy,” Lupoi quoted Elena as saying before she was led out with her husband to be shot.

The execution was carried out by a three-man firing squad after a two-hour trial by a military tribunal on Christmas Day.

Lupoi said that, when soldiers were asked to volunteer for the firing squad, “everybody volunteered,” so the three squad members were chosen by lottery.

Lupoi told journalists inside the Communist Party Central Committee headquarters that he saw the full videotapes of the trial and execution.

As the two were led out to the execution by the soldiers, Elena said to them: “I was like a mother to you,” Lupoi said.

“What sort of a mother were you, who killed our mothers?” one soldier replied.

Lupoi said the trial and execution took place in a secret military installation whose location will never be revealed for fear of sabotage by remnants of Ceausescu’s dreaded Securitate secret police.

He said the Ceausescus refused to cooperate with the tribunal, saying it had no authority over them and demanding that they be tried by the Parliament because the members of the tribunal were only ordinary citizens.

“You can shoot us if you like, but we do not recognize you as a court,” Nicolae Ceausescu, 71, was quoted as saying in his final hours.

Lupoi said the Ceausescus had each been offered a defense lawyer but had refused him. Ceaucescu rejected the charge of being responsible for the deaths of 60,000 people and totally rejected as unproven charges that he and his family had embezzled $1 billion.

On the brevity of Ceausescu’s trial, Lupoi answered laconically: “It was carried out exactly according to the law--the law that Ceausescu himself promulgated.”

Lupoi was speaking in the ruins of what was formerly Ceausescu’s office in the Central Committee building, marked with bullet holes, the windows broken and with papers strewn about its bloodstained floor.

The huge office, once luxuriously furnished, had been filled with priceless art objects, since taken to a safe place.

Elena’s huge office nearby had been filled with gold and gifts presented by various foreign dignitaries.

Touted as her country’s greatest scientific mind, she had had another office turned into a chemical laboratory with solid gold instruments, said the commander of the troops defending the Central Committee, Col. Radulu.