Christmas Day memories are made of this: a turkey dinner, exchanging gifts, watching television, family togetherness, peace on Earth and goodwill to all men. Dorin-Marian Cirlan’s abiding memory is of the Christmas Day he shot a dictator.

“I know what I would rather have been doing,” said Mr Cirlan, who was a member of the three-man squad that killed Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife, Elena, on December 25, 1989. “As a Christian it is a horrible thing to have to take someone’s life — and that on Christmas Day, that holy holiday.”

Mr Cirlan was in the elite 64th Boteni parachute regiment when Romania crumpled in the 1989 revolution. Unlike the upheavals in Poland, East Germany, Hungary and Czechoslovakia, blood was spilt — some of