Steven N.
Two units of the National Bureau of Investigation appeared at City Hall on Monday morning to conduct a search in the offices of the Budapest Head Notary and Deputy Mayor Kiss Ambrus in connection with the City Hall affair, reports Magyar Hang. A search was also conducted at the apartment of the Budapest Property Manager.
Mayor Gergely Karácsony (pictured) reacted to the events with a strong post on Facebook:
The police have also become a Fidesz propaganda tool, and the investigative authorities have been involved in political smear campaigns – they have crossed this red line as well. They will be held responsible for it. I have just called the Minister of the Interior, Sándor Pintér, and demanded an explanation from him. I most strongly rejected this and requested to know the procedure in which the police are cooperating in a smear campaign that serves the interests of Fidesz. Of course, I should have called Antal Rogán…
The mayor continued by remarking on the leaked speech by House Speaker László Kövér to senior intelligence officials last year:
What László Kövér gave the green light for senior security officials to do in his scandalous speech to them has occurred. The opposition is now the target, and after months of being secretly surveilled, followed, and wiretapped, they have now taken care of the police too.
Mayor Karácsony also strongly refuted the purported basis for the searches, the accusation by the pro-government press that the Budapest City Council had been secretly negotiating the sale of Budapest City Hall:
What kind of a procedure is this when a search is carried out at the Head Notary’s office on the basis of an order in which it is stated in black and white: the Budapest City Council has never given an order to anyone to sell the City Hall. So they’re looking for what we didn’t give an authorization for?
Gergely Karácsony closes his post ominously, stating that:
From today, no one is safe in this country. If people talk about someone they don’t even know and then it’s intercepted, it’s not the slanderers who the police go after, but the victim. As of today, we are forced to view the investigating authorities as the servants of Fidesz’s campaign. This cannot remain without consequences…
