Nicolae Ceaușescu the country in the three days since the Ceaușescus fled Bucharest. Similarly, Victor Stănculescu, who had been defense minister before going over to the revolution, said in 2009 that the alternative would have been seeing the Ceaușescus lynched on the streets of Bucharest. The Ceaușescus were the last people to be executed in Romania before the abolition of capital punishment on 7 January 1990. Nicolae and Elena Ceaușescu were originally buried in simple graves at Ghencea Cemetery in Bucharest, on opposite sides of a path; their graves were often decorated with flowers and symbols of communist rule. In April 2007,
Trial of Nicolae and Elena Ceaușescu Trial of Nicolae and Elena Ceaușescu The trial of Nicolae and Elena Ceaușescu was a short trial held on 25 December 1989 by an Exceptional Military Tribunal, a drumhead court-martial created at the request of the Council of the National Salvation Front, resulting in the death sentence and execution of former Romanian President and Romanian Communist Party General Secretary, Nicolae Ceaușescu, and his wife, Elena Ceaușescu. Marked by irregularities that are typical of kangaroo courts and show trials, the main charge was genocide—namely, murdering "over 60,000 people" during the revolution in Timișoara. Other sources put the death toll between 689