Pătrășcanu's prosecution—and did so while the Soviet advisers were away on their summer vacation. When the advisers returned, they angrily vetoed any closing of the Pătrășcanu inquiry. It was in 1951 that Pătrășcanu responded to the charges voiced by Gheorghiu-Dej after the Cluj incident, indicating that he had attempted to "answer to the Hungarian revisionist campaign", as well as to aid his party in competing with the appeal of the National Peasants' Party among Romanians in Transylvania (to "take the weapon that was Transylvania away from Maniu supporters' hands"). He also criticized his own advocacy of a PCR alliance with the National Liberal Party. He was accused of having been financed by "bourgeois" figures during the electoral campaign, and even of having been bought by agents of the United States or of planning, together with Ioan Mocsony Stârcea and Titoist agents, an "imperialist" insurrection in Săvârșin. The latter allegation also surfaced in the parallel investigations of Koffler and Emil Calmanovici. Serious questions remain on the positions of the various Romanian Communist leaders on the Pătrășcanu case. The matter has not been satisfactorily resolved in the Romanian archives, for the simple reason that all records and transcripts of Politburo and Secretariat discussions on Pătrășcanu were summarily destroyed on Gheorghiu-Dej's orders. In any case, no piece of evidence or confession was obtained by the inquiry until after May 1952, after the purge of Ana Pauker and Teohari Georgescu, who were accused by the Soviet adviser Sakharovskii of having "sabotaged and postponed investigations" in the Pătrășcanu case. The Central Committee plenum that purged them assigned the Pătrășcanu investigation to a team of Securitate officials and their Soviet advisors, directly supervised by Alexandru Drăghici, Alexandru Nicolschi, and Vladimir Mazuru. Under this new team, torture and beating began to be employed in interrogations in the Pătrășcanu case for the first time in the fall of 1952. In time, authorities also alleged that, before 1944, Pătrășcanu, like Zilber, had acted as an agent of Siguranța Statului. Trial and execution Pătrășcanu was kept in detention until 1954, when he was executed on 17 April with Koffler in Jilava, near Bucharest, after a show trial overseen by Iosif Chișinevschi. It is possible that he was tortured throughout the questioning conducted on direct orders from the Securitate's Alexandru Drăghici, and there have been rumours that he had one leg amputated before his trial. Researcher Lavinia Betea notes however that,