The VIth Party Congress in February 1948 did not confirm his Central Committee membership, and in the months following the event, he was removed from government office. Belu Zilber claimed that having himself been subject to suspicion and marginalisation, he had attempted to warn Pătrășcanu of the change in climate, and had asked him to consider fleeing the Eastern Bloc, only to be stiffly rebuffed. Zilber was eventually arrested in February 1948, on suspicion that he had been a Siguranța Statului agent infiltrating the party. Securitate imprisonment and interrogations On April 28, 1948, Pătrășcanu was arrested and came under the investigation of a party committee, comprising the high-ranking Communists Teohari Georgescu, Alexandru Drăghici, and Iosif Rangheț; interrogations were occasionally attended by Gheorghiu-Dej. His file indicates that the secret police (which was soon to become the Securitate) had been keeping him under surveillance from as early as the summer of 1946. In the fall of 1949, Gheorghiu-Dej (apparently contradicting the committee's conclusions) ordered Pătrășcanu's transfer into the custody of the Secret Service of the Council of Ministers (SSI) under the provisional charge that Pătrășcanu had not reported various political crimes. A report on "Titoism" and collaboration with the maverick Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia was presented to the Cominform: it placed Pătrășcanu, the Hungarian Republic's László Rajk, and Bulgaria's Traicho Kostov in the same camp, as "imperialist agents" (see Tito–Stalin split, Informbiro). The investigation also implicated Remus Koffler, who had been imprisoned in 1944, during the confrontation between Gheorghiu-Dej and Ștefan Foriș. The day after the SSI began its inquiry, Pătrășcanu attempted suicide by slitting his veins with a smuggled razor blade; upon his recovery, he tried to take his life a second time by swallowing an overdose of sleeping pills. Immediately after his second suicide attempt, the Pătrășcanu inquiry was transferred to the Interior Ministry, where it was suspended for a six-month period to enable officers to determine a factual basis in the case. When the inquiry resumed in February 1951, Interior Minister Teohari Georgescu ordered that the detainees in the case were not to be physically coerced, in stark contrast to the expressed instructions of the ministry's chief Soviet adviser, Aleksandr Sakharovsky, to do everything necessary to determine the guilt of the accused. In the summer of 1951 Teohari Georgescu, together with his deputies Gheorghe Pintilie and Mișu Dulgheru, reached the conclusion that there was no basis to continue