Former secret service head: Communist head Voronin had plan to assasinate Ilie Ilascu, told me to gather compromising materials about party members

Former secret service head Valeriu Pasat recently held a press conference in which he launched a series of accusations against Communist head and former President (2001-2009) Vladimir Voronin.

Mr. Pasat said that he was arrested in March 2005 at the orders of Mr. Voronin and released in 2007 at Mr. Voronin's orders, as well.

Mr. Pasat argued that Mr. Voronin had at least three reasons to order his imprisonment and allegedly try to get rid of him while he was in jail.

First, right after Mr. Voronin came to power, Mr. Pasat allegedly refused to gather up information about Party of Communists members and give it to Mr. Voronin, who wanted to have it in order to blackmail his party members.

Second, because in the summer of 2001, Mr. Pasat stopped Mr. Voronin's attempt to sell weapons that would have ended up in the hands of Chechen rebels.

Third, Mr. Pasat avered that Mr. Voronin's family tried to buy the Cuciurgan electrical plant, which was later privatized by Russian company RAO ES, where Mr. Pasat ended up working.

Mr. Pasat also mentioned that Vladimir Voronin had a plan to assassinate former political prisoner Ilie Ilascu [Imedia: who was caught by Transnistrian authorities during the civil war in 1992 and let go years later] after staging an operation to save the other Moldovan political prisoners held by the separatists in the Hlinoaia prison.

Communist M.P. Vladimir Turcan confirmed to Stirea Zilei today that a file of information on him had begun to circulate in 2001, noting that everything it included was false. Mr. Turcan said he went to Mr. Voronin at the time and asked him why the file ended up on his desk. "Mr. Voronin didn't answer me. He just said that he didn't believe the materials were true," Mr. Turcan added.