A Bucharest court on Wednesday started the trial of Alexandru Visinescu, a former prison commander accused of aggravated murder in the deaths of at least 12 political prisoners under the Communist regime.

This is the first trial of a head of a Communist-era lockup in Romania.

Prosecutors say Visinescu, who is now 89, was involved in beating detainees, depriving them of medical treatment and exposing them to cold. Many political prisoners, including a former diplomat and a party leader, died as a result.

Between 1956 and 1963, Visinescu ran the notorious Ramnicu Sarat prison where Romania’s pre-communist leaders and intellectual elite were incarcerated.

More than 50 years have passed since the prisoners’ deaths, but under Romanian law, there is no time limit on prosecuting serious crimes.

The widow of one detainee, General Ion Eremia, who died in 2003, asked the court for 100,000 euro in moral and financial damages. Eremia was sentenced to 14 years in prison for writing a satirical novel about the Soviet leader Stalin.

Valentin Cristea, the last survivor of the Ramnicu Sarat prison, says the trial it is important, but has comes late in the day. “It is an event I could not bear to watch … It won’t recognize anything, won’t remember anything,” Cristea told local media.

But civic activists hope that Visinescu’s trial will be the first of many, with prosecutors looking at 35 other former Communist officials.

Two other former Communist-era jail bosses, Ioan Ficior and Florian Cormos, are also accused of causing deaths and torturing political prisoners. They both deny wrongdoing.

The last Romanian to be convicted of genocide was the former Communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu who was hurriedly tried and executed in 1989.

After decades of denial, Romania has finally started to try to punish Communist-era crimes. In April, the Romanian Institute for Investigating the Crimes of Communism, IICCMER, published a list of 35 people allegedly involved in detaining and torturing dissidents during Communist times.

Chilling details have emerged about the torments that guards inflicted on political prisoners in the gulags.

Reports have said that around 120,000 of a total of 617,000 political prisoners died in the gulags. Most were politicians, priests, writers and diplomats but some were also peasants.

The investigating committee is currently concentrating on political crimes from the early 1950s until 1964, when a general amnesty was declared.