20 miners (or 22) were buried under tight security, with only their closest relatives allowed to be present; the graves were closely guarded for a time so as to prevent new disturbances. Three miners died in the following days. The government paid the families of those who had been shot. Reactions After the strike was repressed, various motives were ascribed to it. At the time, the National Peasants' Party (PNȚ) was in power; D.R. Ioanițescu, President of the Chamber of Deputies, blamed the extreme poverty of the underpaid workers and "possibly" Hungarian propagandists. (A majority of the dead were ethnic Hungarians.) Another member of the government blamed the mine directors; he alleged that the repeated refusals of the bosses to yield to the workers' demands and their dismissive assertions that they were led on by provocateurs of the banned Romanian Communist Party had driven them to desperation. Notably, this was not an isolated incident; nineteen strikes had taken place in the Valley between 1924 and 1928. The Social Democrats, allies of the government, mainly blamed the mine directors but also charged that Communist agitators had misled the workers. The mines belonged to a group of bankers from the National Liberal Party (the Peasants' bitter rivals), and one of their owners was Gheorghe Tătărescu, a minister in the previous government. The following commentary appeared in the right-wing newspaper Universul just after the strike: "The troops only did their duty. The fault does not lie with them. They fired. It's a good thing they did so and it's good for people to know that they will fire whenever they receive orders to do so". Later, the chief military and civilian figures responsible for the shooting were removed from their positions as the press came to accept the fact that the strike dealt with poor conditions and was not a communist-led anti-regime action. As early as 9 August, the left-leaning Adevărul wrote: "What happened at Lupeni is a warning for our leaders, who for ten years have divided the country and ruined her economically, everywhere spreading misery, the mother of desperate mass actions". D.I. Răducanu, the Minister of Labour, went to the Jiu Valley to investigate, and even Nicolae Lupu, a prominent PNȚ politician, pleaded the workers' cause in Parliament. Still, the fear of communist control of the strike had not been unjustified: working conditions in the mines had not been widely reported