Handgun, illustrative stock photo (source: Sme )
TEK members were only doing their job, and there is no question about who is professional and who amateur; but rather, who is preparing to commit a crime, said Vice-chair of the Hungarian Parliamentary Committee for Security, Szilárd Németh, member of Fidesz. The committee discussed the case on November 25, having received information from the Interior Ministry.
“Members of the committee univocally agreed,” Németh stressed, as quoted by the TASR newswire. “They congratulated TEK and thanked it for doing its job. Everyone deemed it obvious that the centre fulfilled the task which it was established to do: it detained people possessing guns and explosives.” He added that in Hungary, it is not allowed to be in possession of guns or explosives without a license.
The four people detained on November 20 by TEK are not terrorists, however, but rather a group of youths whose hobby is exploring World War II history. Two of them are members of the Hungarian ethnic minority living in Slovakia, TASR quoted the Hungarian website Index.hu. Thus, the committee denied the original TEK statement that they detained an extremist group with international connections. The four had in their car remnants of guns found by metal detectors in forests around the city of Veszprém.
On November 25, the court refused pre-trial custody for one of the youth which was initiated by the Budapest district prosecutor’s office. At the weekend, TEK also made a raid in which it detained a total of six people in possession of automatic guns, ammunition and explosives. On November 24, the court ordered to take two people from the first case into custody; they are suspected of the crime of abuse of a firearm.
