About 100 people from Tantareni village of Anenii Noi district Monday protested in front of the mayor’s office against the building of a waste recycling plant in the settlement. They accused the mayor of falsifying documents.

Protester Silvia Pogrebean, medical nurse at the local school, has told IPN that the mayor forces them to sign that they are in favor of opening the plant. “He tells us that there will be built a water treatment station. But the people want neither treatment station, nor waste dump. The mayor’s office is falsifying documents. We will seek a meeting with the head of state today,” she stated.

Mayor of Tantareni Ion Mastan stated for IPN that the protest was staged by a group of councilors and several locals, who blocked the work of the mayor’s office for three hours. They took the key from the guard by force and allowed nobody to enter the building of the local administration. As to the collected signatures, the mayor said that he wants to find out the opinion of the villagers, but nobody is obliged to sign.

The protests started at 08.00. Some of the protesters complained that they were punched. The police came to clam things down. 

Contacted by IPN, the President’s spokesman Vlad Turcanu said that no meeting of Nicolae Timofti and the inhabitants of Tantareni was scheduled for today.  

The garbage from Chisinau has been taken to the waste dump in Tantareni until 2011, when, following protests and road blocking staged by locals, the municipal authorities decided to transport the waster to the Purcel landfill in Bubuieci village on a temporary basis. This year, the municipal authorities and the local authorities of Tantareni reached an agreement to resume taking the garbage to the local waste dump.