Basescu, in court: I did not know I was given codename/ Decision to be handed down September 20

Former President Traian Basescu stated, on Thursday, at the Bucharest Court of Appeals (CAB), that no student of the Navy Institute went willingly to the counterintelligence officer, but that they were called. Traian Basescu was present at the CAB where the trial in which the National Council for the Study of the Securitate Archives (CNSAS) requested the court establish whether Basescu was a collaborator of the Securitate (e.n. - Romania's communist-era secret police). The court will hand down the decision on September 20. "The law forced me to answer (...) In what regards punishments, when you are a military student you can be expelled," Basescu said, mentioning that he gave two notes to counterintelligence officer Tudor. He emphasized that he could not take the risk of having new measures taken against him, especially since he was only a year before completing his studies. "He asked me about things that happened a year or two before. (...) The counterintelligence officer knew something. (...) I had a weight to me by an incident and a colleague," the former head of state stated, reminding that due to not reporting a colleague as missing from the unit he was placed in arrest for seven days. "I didn't know I was given a codename. I did not sign a commitment where a codename could have been established. (...) I didn't know that Military Counterintelligence was the Securitate. I thought it was a service of the Ministry of National Defence," he defended himself. He mentioned that the students at the civilian section of the Navy Institute did not have an interdiction to contact foreign citizens, to have relations with them outside the professional scope. He recalled that in the summer, as students, they would go to Mamaia [resort], where they'd meet youths from Czechoslovakia. "The Romanian ships operated in all of the worlds' ports and in the commercial section students were familiarized to have contacts with foreigners. (...) I never considered that these relations of ours with Czech students could be condemned. We didn't hide, because nobody forbid it," Basescu mentioned. In her turn, Traian Basescu's lawyer mentioned that at the time the notes were drawn up he had the status of serviceman and would be subject to the rigors imposed by that status. The former President received so far from the CNSAS, starting with the early 2000's, five certificates attesting he was not a Securitate collaborator.AGERPRES(RO - author: Iulia Carciog, editor: Georgiana Tanasescu; EN - author: Razvan-Adrian Pandea, editor: Maria Voican)