GIPSY CANNIBALISM

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 708, 6 July 1929, Page 11

GIPSY CANNIBALISM

CZECHO-SLOVAKIAN HORRORS 101 MEN AND WOMEN INDICTED Gruesome details were revealed at the trial at Kosice, Northern Slovakia, of the 101 gipsies arrested two years ago following revelations of murder and cannibalism in Moldava Wood, on the Slovak-Hungarian border. The young leader of the band, Alexander Filke, is accused of several murders. Shortly after his arrest he confessed that the flesh of many of his victims had been cooked and eaten. Cannibalism, however, is not indictable as a crime in Czecho-Slovakia, being outside the provisions of the penal code. The police believe that the gang was responsible for at least 25 deaths, the murdered persons being frontier smugglers and pedlars whose movements would not have been so closely followed as to lead to inquiries. Axe Blows It is alleged that the usual method of the gipsies with their victims, men or -women, was to detain them in friendly conversation till one of the band could approach stealthily from behind with an axe and strike a murderous blow. The rest was simple. Human bones, many of which have been found and will be produced in evidence, were buried in lonely spots in dense forests. The accused themselves revealed the hiding places. The gipsies, who are represented by several counsel, will plead that they were driven to crime by privation and hunger. During the two years that have elapsed since the arrest all the prisoners have developed tuberculosis. Most of them are undersized and degenerate in appearance, and several are deaf mutes. Filke -was among the 17 men and two women charged recently with six murders and many robberies. He tokl the judges that he believed in a devil, but not in God, and denied all his previous confessions of guilt. He declared that the police beat him until he said what they wanted, and that he was ready to confess to anything rather than endure further flogging. Grulo Barnabas, another of the men charged, was able to prove an alibi. He was in hospital at Kosice receiving eye treatment on the date of a murder attributed to him. The judge later lost patience and cried to the prisoners: “You have all confessed to murders and now you say that you have never seen any murders committed.” The gipsies shouted in chorus: “We were taken to a forest by policemen, bound to trees, and flogged until we agreed to everything they said.” The judge then remarked: “I have never heard of policemen flogging prisoners.” One of the prisoners, Imre Szigar, retorted: “We had to feel it, and feeling is believing.” Another prisoner, Rybar, said - n police officers extorted a confession from him by wedging sharpened pencils under his finger nails. Evidently the judge intends to enforce a strong censorship on the publication of the cannibalistic details aud the allegations against the police. He confiscated all cameras produced in the courtroom, and threatened to exclude any Press representatives whose journals published exaggerated reports.