People were dissolved in acid and flushed down the sewer, says People’s Artist Liubomir Iorga

“In the basement of the Ministry of the Interior in Chisinau, people were dissolved in acid and flushed down the sewer”, Liubomir Iorga, People’s Artist, folk musician and former member of Joc dance ensemble, told Info-Prim Neo. He referred to a meeting with Major General Iosif Mordovet, former chief of NKVD in Moldova between 1953 and 1954. Iorga met him in 1967, when he accompanied the then-famous piano master Jan Vizitiu. “A woman, who taught at the Conservatory, called us to tune a piano”, he remembers. “At one moment, a very old man came from one of the rooms. With his eyebrows covering his eyes, he looked like 80, maybe even 90. He invited us for drink. I looked at him for a while and then I told him he looked familiar to me. He was surprised and asked me where we could’ve met. I told him he had been a candidate in 1947 for the Cahul precinct. That’s how I memorized General Mordovet”, Iorga said. “He smiled and praised my memory. I told him there was one more man, a general called Vecinkin, with him, in the electoral bills. He was dressed like a border guard, which means he was in the KGB. It proved he even was a KGB chief”, the artist remembers. “We talked and the general told us how he had barely escaped when they shot Beria. “I should’ve been shot along with Merkulov, Sudoplatov and others”, he confessed. Mordotev told us he survived because he absconded in a hospital, in Ribnita, for 3 months. A special team was sent after him, but he escaped. According to the general, the agents reported he had committed suicide”, Iorga said. “I asked him why they wanted to shoot him and he told me: “We didn’t do good things, we executed orders. We shot people. The Ministry of the Interior has 2 large cellars that reach Sadovaia Street (currently Mateevici). We killed people and stored them in acid until the bodies became jelly and then we flushed it into the sewerage, which spilled them in the Bic River”. The general told me they had 2 places where they shot people: the Prokuratura on Armeneasca Street, and Buciumul, near the NKVD headquarters”, Liubomir Iorga stated. He says he saw those cellars himself. “I visited them. These things exist and must be seen. Why doesn’t the press film them? I was artistic director in their club, when Nicolai Bradulov was minister. They didn’t have money to pay me for that particular job, so they invented I could be paid for supervising an ammunition store, which was located near the cellars Mordovet told me about. You enter the Ministry from Stefan cel Mare side, you go forward, then down the stairs, more than a level. Those cellars are huge, about 8 meters wide”, Liubomir Iorga recounted.