the times | Thursday December 3 2020 2GM 41
Wo r l d
The organiser of an all-male orgy in
Brussels attended by a key lieutenant of
Viktor Orban, the Hungarian prime
minister who is opposed to gay rights,
has said that compulsory group sex and
no condoms were the only rules.
Jozsef Szajer, 59, a conservative Hun-
garian MEP who was arrested after try-
ing to flee the party, was disowned last
night by Mr Orban, who said that he
had no place in his political family.
David Manzheley, 29, who organised
the party, which was illegal under coro-
navirus lockdown restrictions, revealed
details of the event. “We have a chat, we
have a drink. Just like in a pub. The only
difference is that in the meantime we
also have sex with each other,” he told
Cartels blamed for Brazil’s
second huge heist in a day
from the city’s main square where the
bank was located, as shots rang out. A
military police station in the city was
simultaneously attacked, preventing
officers from responding immediately.
The modus operandi of the gang
appeared almost identical to that seen
in another raid in the provincial city of
Criciuma, about 3,600km away, in the
early hours of Tuesday.
Both cities are relatively remote, with
populations of less than 200,000
people and weaker security than larger
areas. Banks in Brazil are known to
have large cash deposits in December
in preparation for workers withdrawing
their bonuses.Armed men have targeted a city in
northern Brazil, robbing a bank and
killing a hostage, in the second such
raid in the country in less than 24 hours.
The attack in Cametá involved at
least 20 criminals with assault rifles
who targeted a branch of the state-run
Bank of Brazil. Officials have not said
how much was stolen.
The attacks are suspected to have
been carried out by cartels.
Videos taken by residents of the city
during the robbery showed a line of
about a dozen hostages being led awayBrazil
Stephen GibbsOrban disowns MEP arrested at gay orgy
the Het Laatste Nieuws newspaper
yesterday. He described the moment on
Friday night when Belgian police
raided his apartment after neighbours
complained.
“Suddenly my whole living room was
full of cops,” he said. “They immediate-
ly started shouting, ‘ID card! Now!’ But
we weren’t even wearing underpants.
How the hell could we quickly pull out
our ID cards? That only made the offi-
cers angry. They were very unfriendly
and said mean things about gays.”
Mr Szajer, whose wife is also high in
Hungary’s political elite, tried to escape
naked out of a first-floor window. He
was arrested in the street. Police allege
that Class A drugs were found in his
backpack. He resigned as an MEP on
Sunday without referring to his arrest.
A lawyer who studied at Balliol
College, Oxford, he co-founded theChristian hard-right Fidesz party with
Mr Orban. Before his resignation he
was chief whip and vice-chairman of
the European People’s Party (EPP), a
pan-European conservative grouping
that includes Angela Merkel’s Christian
Democrats as well as Fidesz.
Last night Mr Orban, 57, issued a
statement through his spokesman.
“What our representative, Jozsef
Szajer, did has no place in the
values of our political family.
We will not forget nor repudi-
ate his 30 years of work but his
deed is unacceptable and
indefensible. Following this, he
took the only appropriate
decision when he
apologised and re-
signed from his posi-
tion as member of the
European parliamentand left Fidesz. We have noted his
decision.”
Police arrested at least 20 other men,
including two European diplomats.
They were fined €250 for breaching
coronavirus restrictions. Mr Manzhe-
ley, a PhD student, said that he did not
know the MEP, who attended as a
“friend of a friend”.
“He said he had lived in Brussels for
a long time and also occasionally or-
ganised sex parties at home,” the stu-
dent told the Nieuwsblad news-
paper. Mr Manzheley said that his
parties were regular events. He in-
sisted on one precaution,
that participants “do
not have HIV and, re-
cently, no corona”. Headded: “It is about free sex. Everyone
who comes here comes to have sex. Sex
without a condom. And only with men.”
Despite Mr Szajer’s importance in
Hungarian politics, the country’s me-
dia, which is dominated by pro-Fidesz
news organisations, had covered the
story sparingly.
Index, which used to be a bastion of
independent journalism but was re-
cently taken over by the government,
dedicated an entire article to the refusal
by several ministers to comment.
Another outlet had an interview with a
Fidesz MEP, who said: “Let him who is
without sin cast the first stone.”
Coverage of the scandal has focused
more on the gay sex element of the
party than Mr Szajer’s potential drug
charges because he drafted the 2011
Hungarian constitution to outlaw
same-sex marriage.Israel faces
fourth poll
in two years
Israel
Anshel Pfeffer Jerusalem
Israel faces the prospect of a fourth
general election in two years after the
parliament backed a vote that is likely
to lead to a new poll.
The eight-month partnership
government of Binyamin Netanyahu,
the prime minister, and Benny Gantz,
the alternate prime minister, appears to
have ended after Mr Gantz voted in
favour of a motion brought by the
opposition to dissolve the Knesset.
According to the agreement signed
in May, Mr Netanyahu, 71, was to serve
as prime minister until next November
and then switch places with Mr Gantz,- Mr Netanyahu’s refusal to expedite a
new state budget for the coming year
has heightened suspicions that he is not
planning to go ahead with the “rota-
tion” or co-operate with his coalition
partners.
Mr Gantz accused the prime minister
of focusing on his own “political
survival” and trying to avoid going on
trial next year on bribery and fraud
charges.
According to insiders in Likud, Mr
Netanyahu’s party, he is keen to avoid
an election early next year because the
country will not have received enough
doses of coronavirus vaccine for its
entire population. Likud is behind in
the polls, a result of the government’s
handling of the pandemic.
Jozsef Szajer was
against gay rightsA wartime Enigma cipher machine has
been found on the seabed in the Baltic,
snarled up in an old fishing net.
It is thought to have been
thrown into the sea in the days
before Nazi Germany’s sur-
render in May 1945, when
dozens of U-boats were
scuttled in Gelting Bay,
near the Danish border,
so that they would not
fall into Allied hands.
The machine, right,
was spotted by German
divers working for the
environmental group WWF
to locate “ghost nets” discarded
Mystery sunken object was an Enigma
by trawlers. They were surveying the
waters from a catamaran when their so-
nar system picked up an unusual signal.
The rusted machine they found ap-
peared at first to be a typewriter. Its sig-
nificance was only realised later.
The Enigma devices formed
the backbone of Nazi military
cryptography during the
Second World War but
few have survived.
Some fetch more than
£400,000 at auction. In
1943 codebreakers at
Bletchley Park cracked
the ciphers.
After Hitler’s suicide
on April 30, 1945, his suc-
cessor Grand Admiral Karl
Doenitz ordered naval vesselsthat could not be adapted to civilian life
to be scuttled and their cipher ma-
chines destroyed or thrown into the
sea. The order was rescinded days later
but not before 47 U-boats and a de-
stroyer were sunk in the bay.
The Enigma machine now belongs to
the German state of Schleswig-Hol-
stein, in whose waters it was found, and
will be restored at the archaeology
museum in the Schloss Gottorf palace,
Schleswig.
“We’ve been working on ridding the
Baltic of these dangerous ghost nets for
many years,” Gabriele Dederer, of the
WWF, said. “We frequently find larger
objects in the nets. Often these so-
called hook points are tree trunks or
stones. But the Enigma is in historical
terms by far the most exciting.”Germany
Oliver Moody Berlin
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Bruno Waterfield Brussels
Oliver Moody Berlin
Pod squad This photo of bottlenose dolphins off Mikurajima, Japan, is one of 50 shortlisted for the $25,000 Agora award. The public can vote until December 28
REIKO TAKAHASHI/AGORA/TRIANGLE NEWS