A HUNGARIAN court has handed down life sentences to three far-right gang members convicted of murdering six gypsies, including the gunning down of a father and his four-year-old son as they fled their burning home.
Another member of the neo-Nazi gang received a 13-year sentence for his part in a string of gun and grenade attacks which occurred between 2008 and 2009, and also left five people injured.
The court also ruled that brothers Arpad and Istvan Kiss and Zsolt Peto, the recipients of the life sentences, were ineligible for parole. All four of the guilty had pleaded innocent.
Outside the Budapest court gypsies, or Roma as they are known, many wearing t-shirts with pictures of the victims with the slogan “Their Sin was Their Colour”, cheered when the verdict was announced.
Pledging to “reinstall order” and stop gypsy “crime” the gang generally carried out their attacks in rural areas at night, and in one incident shot a woman dead while she was sleeping. In their most notorious attack, the gang killed 29-year-old Robert Csorba and his young son, also called Robert, in the village of Tatarszentgyorgy as the two ran from their home which the gang had torched.
“To carry out their plans first they bought arms, then began to ‘reinstall order’, meaning armed attacks in places where Roma had committed crimes against Hungarians,” said Judge Laszlo Miszori yesterday.
Police documents showed that the authorities dragged their feet in investigating the Tatarszentgyorgy attack, although the earlier killings had already unleashed fear throughout the Roma community for months.
The attacks increased tensions between ethnic Hungarians and the Roma, which make up some seven per cent of Hungary’s 10-million population and remain confined to the margins of society, bedevilled by endemic rates of poverty and unemployment.
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