Sky News scandal: Romanian prosecutors call British journalists for hearings

Romanian anti-organized crime prosecutors said that they would summon the journalists of the British media group Sky News for hearings to find out how they made their article about alleged arms dealers in Romania.

The prosecutors who have been investigating the alleged arms trafficking case have found strong evidence to support the idea that the article was a fake. They arrested three of the five Romanians involved in making the Sky News feature, on Thursday last week. The three men were charged with complicity to spreading false statements about Romania that may affect the country’s security.

According to the Directorate for Combatting Organized Crime and Terrorism - DIICOT, one of the alleged arms dealers, Aurelian Szanto, was contacted by British journalist Stuart Ramsay’s team at the beginning of June. They asked Szanto if he wanted to work as a translator for a documentary about guns and help them find some people who owned military guns to appear in the documentary. The man presented the journalists with some friends who owned hunting rifles. He claims that the British journalists had given them a script and instructed him and his friends what to say in the video. He also said he was paid for this job.

Stuart Ramsay continues to claim that his story is genuine and that the men he met were gun dealers. Meanwhile, Romania’s ambassador in the UK has filed a complaint with the British audiovisual authority and Prime Minister Dacian Ciolos said that the Romanian authorities should take stand in this case.

Paul Brummell, the British ambassador to Bucharest, said on Twitter that Sky News was a private television, and that the British authorities couldn’t express their view on the article written by Stuart Ramsay. He was asked by Romanian Twitter users to express his view.

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