ROMANIA: When the file landed on Dan Voinea's desk in 1997, it was his biggest case in 20 years as a state prosecutor - find out what really happened when 17,000 miners from across Romania rampaged through central Bucharest in June 1990, killing six anti-government protesters and injuring hundreds more in a frenzy of violence.
For three years his team interviewed women who were raped and men who were viciously beaten as the horde tore into their demonstration against president Ion Iliescu, while the police and army stood by, intervening only to arrest more than 1,000 unarmed marchers.
Voinea began to suspect that responsibility for the deadly riots lay with Iliescu, who had seized power from dictator Nicolae Ceausescu in 1989 and ruled until defeat at the polls in 1996. They were seven years in which thousands of liberals, academics and intellectuals fled a stagnant Romania dominated by Iliescu's clique of ex-communists.
In 2000, as he was nearing the end of his investigation, Voinea ran out of time: Iliescu was re-elected. "The files were taken away and I was ordered to stop investigating the riots and the 1989 revolution," says Voinea. "I didn't see them again until four months ago."
The burly, soft-spoken lawyer knows he only got to reacquaint himself with the case because of a dramatic shift in Romanian politics, which saw reformist underdog Train Basescu beat Iliescu's anointed successor in last December's presidential election.
That shock defeat tore the hands of Iliescu's allies from levers of power they had controlled for most of the last 15 years and allowed Voinea to resume his investigation into a tragedy that many believe drastically slowed Romania's transition to democracy.
Now he is making up for lost time - and stunned Romanians this month by securing the indictment of Iliescu, who has long been suspected of orchestrating the riots to smash opposition to his rule and cow any future threat to his supremacy.
"We have got to the nucleus of what happened and who ordered it. We have got to Iliescu, the former head of state. Most of our evidence points to him," Voinea told The Irish Times yesterday. "He has been summoned for questioning. He has no immunity from prosecution."
From exhaustive interviews with miners, victims of the riot and high-ranking political and security-force figures, Voinea has concluded that the miners could not possibly have co-ordinated their descent on Bucharest without extensive official help. He is also convinced that the six people who died were felled by army bullets, not by the marauding miners.
Many Romanians - especially in rural regions where Iliescu and the Orthodox Church were reassuring constants during a time of tumultuous change - are loath to see the past dragged up and their former leader's name besmirched.
But Voinea is having none of that, especially as Romania strives to root out corruption ahead of planned EU accession in 2007.