Jurnalistul Liviu Tofan despre atentatul cu bombă de la sediul Europa Liberă din 1981 - Martor

On February 21, 1981, a bomb attack rocked the headquarters of Radio Free Europe in Munich. Four employees were injured, one of them seriously. The target of the attack was the Romanian section of the station, but the bomb accidentally hit the Czech editorial office. Years later, documents discovered in the archives of the German security service indicated that the attack had been organized by the terrorist group of Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, known as Carlos “the Jackal”, under the command of the Ceaușescu regime’s Securitate. Carlos “the Jackal” never admitted involvement in this attack. In the 1980s, Radio Free Europe was one of the voices that the communist regime in Bucharest constantly tried to silence. For the station’s journalists, however, the attack did not mean retreat, but confirmation that their work was reaching where it needed to. “Radio Free Europe has always been, especially in the 1980s, the target of the Securitate and the regime in Bucharest, which wanted to annihilate this radio station. There was never any question of giving up. The reaction of all employees was unequivocal: if we are causing such a disturbance, it means that we are doing an extraordinarily good job and that we must continue,” says journalist Liviu Tofan. Liviu Tofan was the head of the News Section of the Romanian Department at Radio Free Europe, which he led for ten years, until 1990, when he became deputy director of the department. Originally broadcast on February 21, 2024, the interview conducted by Diana Joicaliuc is part of the MARTOR series, produced by Radio Romania Cultural.