Shortly before midnight on February 22, 2009, snow lay on the ground at the edge of Tatárszentgyörgy, a village of about 2,000 people some 50 kilometers south of Budapest. At the end of Fenyves Street, in the last house of the village's Roma settlement, Róbert Csorba, who was 27 and worked in a furniture factory, was asleep with his partner, Renáta Jakab, and their three children. Men dressed in black threw petrol bombs through a window. As Csorba ran out of the burning house holding his son, Robika, with his daughter, Bianka, beside him, a gunman fired. Father and son died. Bianka survived with severe wounds.
The young police officers who came from Dabas, 13 kilometers away, decided the fire had been caused by an electrical short circuit. It was the family, not the police, who found footprints and spent cartridges in the snow. The killings at Tatárszentgyörgy were the fourth and fifth deaths in a series of attacks on Roma homes that had begun the summer before and would end only in August 2009, after six people had been killed. Four men from Debrecen were convicted. The way the state handled the case, from the first police response to the role of its own intelligence services, became a second story that Hungarian courts, ministries and parliament were still dealing with years later.
The men arrested in August 2009 were Árpád Kiss and his younger brother István Kiss, Zsolt Pető and István Csontos. They were between 28 and 42 years old at the time of the attacks, according to Al Jazeera and RTÉ. Árpád Kiss worked as a sound technician; István Kiss and Pető worked as bouncers; Csontos was a former professional soldier who had served with the KFOR peacekeeping force in Kosovo, according to the journalist András B. Vágvölgyi. When they were arrested, police described them as a pastry chef, a sound technician and a soldier, all working at the Debrecen bar where they were held.
Prosecutors said they were hard-core fans of the Debrecen football club with neo-Nazi links, and that they had clashed with Roma before (Al Jazeera, citing prosecutors). Romea.cz reported that three of them had openly espoused racist views and that two had ties to the Hungarian branch of Blood and Honour. Árpád Kiss had belonged to a skinhead group, Véres Kard (Bloody Sword), until early 2008, according to Vágvölgyi. István Kiss had been under surveillance by Hungary's civilian national security service, the NBH, for extremist activity before the killings began (Index, 2013).
According to the indictment as reported by Index and summarized on this site, the three main defendants decided around the turn of 2008 to carry out armed attacks on houses where Roma lived in order to intimidate them. A prosecution report quoted by openDemocracy said their aim was "to set up a private army and initiate a civil war." On March 7, 2008, the Kiss brothers and Pető broke into the home of a hunter's family in Besenyszög, tied up the family and took guns (Index, 2013; 444, 2016). Those weapons were used in the attacks that followed.
The courts dealt with nine attacks. The Hungarian Civil Liberties Union (TASZ) lists them as Galgagyörk on July 21, 2008; Piricse on August 8; Nyíradony on September 5; Tarnabod on September 29; Nagycsécs on November 3; Alsózsolca on December 15; Tatárszentgyörgy on February 23, 2009; Tiszalök on April 22; and Kisléta on August 3. Across them, the four men fired 78 shots and threw 11 petrol bombs, and 55 people were put in danger. Six were killed and five seriously injured. Every victim was Roma.
The method stayed much the same. The men chose houses at the very edge of villages, where they could approach and leave across open ground. They threw petrol bombs to drive people out and shot them as they came through the door. Prosecutors told the court the attacks were planned "with military precision" (Romea.cz, 2013). When they were arrested, police found a map marking past attacks and three more that had been planned (Romea.cz, 2016).
The first attacks killed no one, but they wounded and terrorized. At Piricse in August 2008, Magdolna Getyinás was hit by gunfire as her family's house burned; the family lost the home and moved several times afterward (Index, 2014; Slate). At Tarnabod in September, houses were set on fire with people inside. At Alsózsolca in December, Krisztián Rontó was shot in his garden and left permanently disabled. Five years later he was still the main earner for his family of two small children, traveling to Miskolc for treatment because he had received a single home physiotherapy visit after his surgery (Index, 2014).
The first deaths came at Nagycsécs on November 3, 2008. The house of Tibor Nagy was set alight and the people inside were shot as they fled, according to ERRC, and through a window, according to openDemocracy. Tibor Nagy was wounded. His wife, Éva, and his brother, József Nagy, were killed.
József Nagy had no wife or children (Index, 2014). Index's 2013 report on the verdict named the woman killed as Éva Illés, József's sister-in-law; ERRC calls her Éva Nagy, and 444 uses the Hungarian married form, Mrs. Tibor Nagy. They are the same person. Her son, Tibi, was in prison for theft when she died; he was let out for the funeral but arrived too late to attend it. A man later accused of her killing was held a few cells away from him. Tibor's father had a stroke a few months after the deaths, and five years on Tibor Nagy told Index he still had bad dreams about it.
In a 2022 interview from prison, Árpád Kiss said the Nagycsécs killing was not intended. The court had found intent to kill in every attack, including the ones in which nobody was seriously hurt (Index, 2013).
Róbert Csorba worked in a furniture factory and had been at work the day before he died (Slate, from the book La Hongrie sous Orbán). His partner was Renáta Jakab. Their children were Bianka, who was six; Róbert, called Robika; and the youngest, Máté. His parents, Erzsébet and Csaba Csorba, lived nearby. Their house at the end of Fenyves Street was the last one in the settlement. Index wrote in 2014 that this was why it was chosen: the attackers could get away easily.
The petrol bombs went in shortly before midnight. According to Slate's account of the court findings, Pető threw them, István Kiss waited at the door and Árpád Kiss covered the escape with a shotgun. As the family came out, the shots hit all three. The indictment, quoted by 444, describes the father's last moment: "A teraszról leesés közben Csorba Róbert megpördült, azonban a fiát még mindig a kezében tartotta." (As he fell from the terrace, Róbert Csorba turned around, but he still held his son in his arms.) Renáta Jakab hid in a room with Máté and survived. Robika's grandmother later told ERRC, "I was holding Robi's head in my lap."
Bianka was left with lasting injuries (444, 2019). Csaba Csorba, Robika's grandfather, died of a heart attack four years after the killings, and Erzsébet Csorba told the authors of La Hongrie sous Orbán that at first she simply could not leave the house. "Nous sommes normaux, nous travaillons, et la maison était entretenue," she said when asked why her family was chosen (We are ordinary people, we work, and the house was kept up). After the 2013 verdict she told Reuters, as quoted by Romea.cz, that a chapter was closing for her, but "It's the same as four years ago. We will never get rid of poverty and racism."
The burned house stood at the edge of the village for years afterward (Index, 2014). It was later demolished (Slate).
Jenő Kóka was 54, a grandfather who lived at the end of Nefelejcs Street on the edge of the Roma quarter of Tiszalök. He worked at a nearby pharmaceutical factory, according to TIME. On the night of April 22, 2009, he said goodnight to his wife, Éva, and stepped outside to walk to his night shift. He was shot in the chest and bled to death a few steps from his door.
About 400 people came to his funeral. The Rev. Sándor Gaál told them the killing was part of a "storm" passing over Hungary. Mihály Balogh, the local leader of the Roma minority council, warned that if the killings were not solved it would be hard to stop people from retaliating. A woman at the funeral, who would not give her name, told TIME, "They just keep on killing Roma people."
Mária Balogh lived in Kisléta, about 250 kilometers east of Budapest. She was a widow (Romea.cz, 2013), 43 years old according to a 2013 memorial campaign that named each of the six dead, or 45 according to the Documentation and Cultural Center of German Sinti and Roma. In the early hours of August 3, 2009, the gunmen fired through a window and then broke into the house. She was shot dead in her bed. Her 13-year-old daughter was shot at close range and left for dead. Her family mourned her at her coffin on August 7.
The daughter survived. Her name appears as Ketrin (ERRC), Katrin (Index) and Tímea (openDemocracy, Slate); Index calls her Katrin. At 17, she told Index she still had about 20 pellets in her skull and about 150 in her body, and that the muscles of one hand had died. What troubled her most were the scars on her face and neck, and she hoped for plastic surgery to remove them.
Csontos drove the car at Tiszalök and at Kisléta. Hungary's prime minister called the Kisléta killing an "inhuman" crime that targeted Roma but was an attack on "the entire nation" (Romea.cz, which does not name him).
The failures began before Tatárszentgyörgy. After the Tarnabod attack in September 2008, three young Roma men were arrested and charged with attempted murder. They spent 11 months in custody, and were still there when the real attackers were caught. A court in Eger later awarded them several million forints in compensation (Romea.cz, 2012; 444, 2019). Police and press, ERRC wrote, put the early attacks down to loan sharks, jealous lovers and feuds between Roma families, rather than looking at known violent extremists. For months, police rejected any link between the attacks.
At Tatárszentgyörgy the response was worse. According to rights groups and Romea.cz, the ambulance came about an hour late, with no doctor. Firefighters and a doctor at first suggested the victims had died of smoke. The officers from Dabas called it a short circuit and did not secure the scene. One of them urinated on a footprint. They did not listen to a neighbor, Mrs. Márton, who had heard shots, and they missed the jerrycan used for the petrol bombs (Slate). The gunshot wounds were at first attributed to nails sticking out of the beams (444, 2019). It was the Csorba family who showed police the footprints and cartridges. The next morning Viktória Mohácsi, a Roma member of the European Parliament, arrived and called in the National Investigation Bureau (NNI), whose detectives found the remains of the petrol bombs and the cartridges. The criminal investigation started about ten hours after the attack. Autopsies confirmed gunshot wounds; 444 quotes the autopsy as recording dozens of pellet wounds in the child's body.
The European Roma Rights Centre, TASZ and the Legal Defense Bureau for National and Ethnic Minorities (NEKI) sent a fact-finding mission and published a shadow report in May 2009. It concluded that police, paramedics and firefighters had acted with criminal negligence, and the groups asked police to investigate a racist hate crime (ERRC). Two officers were disciplined, but only after sustained public pressure (Romea.cz). The National Police chief later acknowledged the procedural failings (TASZ).
After Tiszalök, the police changed course. National Police Chief József Bencze put 100 investigators on the case and set up a network meant to seal off any area within five minutes of a reported attack (TIME). He said the killers might have military training, from the army, a law enforcement body, the foreign legion or the Balkan wars, and that racial hatred was one possible motive. Police offered a reward, which was doubled after Kisléta and rose to about 380,000 euros; it was never claimed. FBI profilers helped, and investigators went through 4.5 million intercepted phone calls (Romea.cz, 2016; RTÉ). Only after Jenő Kóka's death did police concede that the attacks were linked and were probably the work of a small cell with military skills (ERRC). They did not stop Kisléta.
TASZ's summary of the case is that the authorities considered a connection and a racial motive only after eight attacks, that the most serious error was at the Tatárszentgyörgy scene, and that the searches after the arrests were also lax. The trial court, it says, spent much of its two-plus years trying to fill the gaps.
On August 21, 2009, about 120 detectives arrested the four men at a nightclub in Debrecen where they worked (Romea.cz; Index). The club was the Perényi 1. Attila Petőfi, head of the NNI, told a press conference that DNA linked two of the suspects to the crimes and that evidence against the other two was still being analyzed. Police seized six hunting rifles, other guns and ammunition. Petőfi said the attacks showed "strategic planning and professional experience in arms use," and that the motive was "presumably racist, but we can clearly state this only if the suspects explain their actions" (RTÉ).
Six people were detained in all. Two were released and placed under police protection as witnesses (Romea.cz, 2016). The handling of the weapons found at the club was itself challenged at trial. The judge ruled that, despite procedural errors, the evidence had not been manipulated (Index, 2013).
Two strands of the case reached into the Hungarian state.
The first was surveillance. The NBH had been watching István Kiss for extremist activity before the first killing. There were grounds to extend the surveillance, and the law allowed it, but it was allowed to lapse before the attacks began (Index, 2013; Romea.cz, 2015).
The second was Csontos. Before he left the army, he had been recruited by the Military Security Office (KBH), the military counterintelligence service. His handler, an officer identified in the Hungarian press as Ernő H., had contact with him during the period of the killings; 444 reports that the handler got in touch after the Tiszalök killing but asked only general questions. The handler and the former leadership of the Defense Ministry denied the relationship, including to a parliamentary committee. After the 2010 change of government, Defense Minister Csaba Hende replaced the KBH leadership, and a report of September 15, 2010, found that former KBH chiefs Ferenc Kovácsics and Ferenc Hamar had committed serious professional, moral and ethical failures. The handler was given only a disciplinary penalty and transferred for "administrative errors" (Index, 2013).
In August 2013, after the first verdict, the Central Chief Prosecutor's Office ordered a military criminal investigation against unknown persons, and the NNI opened an investigation into the Besenyszög robbery, where a fourth, unidentified person was reportedly present (Index, 2013). Interior Minister Sándor Pintér reopened the wider investigation that summer, with the Counter-Terrorism Center coordinating (Index, 2014). In 2015 Romea.cz reported that the Central Military Prosecutor's Office had opened proceedings against four officials on suspicion of forging public documents. Vágvölgyi wrote in 2020 that a military panel convicted three generals and a senior officer in 2016 in a closed trial whose records were classified for 30 years. Csontos was not a defendant in it.
A parliamentary national security committee chaired by József Gulyás, a former SZDSZ member of parliament, examined the intelligence failures in 2009. Gulyás told Index in 2014 that at least one more person had probably helped at Besenyszög and that the attacks could not have happened without financial and moral support. According to a letter from Árpád Kiss quoted by Vágvölgyi, the committee found responsibility among Socialist ministers and the former NBH chief, and sent its report to the Chief Prosecutor, who opened no criminal case. That account comes from Kiss and was not checked against the committee's report.
Prosecutors filed charges in September 2010 (Romea.cz). The first indictment did not mention a racist motive. Amnesty International protested, and prosecutors later said the men had been motivated by racial hatred (Romea.cz, 2013). The 90-page indictment charged the Kiss brothers and Pető with murder and armed robbery committed as a group, and Csontos as an accessory.
The trial opened at the Budapest Environs Regional Court (Budapest Környéki Törvényszék), sitting in Budapest, on March 25, 2011, before Judge László Miszori (TASZ; Index). It lasted 167 court days over two and a half years. Csontos was the only defendant to give evidence against the others; the three principals admitted nothing that led to a death (Telex). A key witness, the woman who ran the Perényi 1 club and who was in a relationship with Árpád Kiss, changed her evidence and gave the four men an alibi, saying they had been at the club at the times of the killings. In 2017 she was tried for perjury. She told that court she had acted out of fear: "Rájöttem, csak élő csalik voltunk" (I realized we were only live bait), and "Félek, hogy ha Árpi mindezt elolvassa, akkor megöl" (I'm afraid that if Árpi reads all this, he'll kill me). The prosecutor pointed to hundreds of letters between the two (Index, 2017). The outcome of the perjury case was not found in the sources opened.
In 2011, former Prime Minister Ferenc Gyurcsány attended a session of the trial (Vágvölgyi). The trial is the subject of Eszter Hajdú's documentary Judgment in Hungary (TASZ).
On August 6, 2013, Judge Miszori sentenced Árpád Kiss, István Kiss and Zsolt Pető to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole. They were convicted of multiple homicide committed in a criminal organization with premeditation, base motive and particular cruelty, partly against victims under 14, along with armed robbery and misuse of firearms. Csontos received 13 years as an accessory, with no early release. All four were barred from public affairs for ten years (Index, 2013; Telex).
The court found an intent to kill in every attack. The judge called the racist motive base and morally unacceptable, and said the men had joined together to terrorize Roma. He gave little weight to mitigating factors, did not treat Csontos's confession as genuine or complete, and did not count the length of the trial in the defendants' favor. He said the sentence should deter others and that public opinion had played no part in it (Index, 2013). The Kiss brothers left the courtroom during the reasoning.
Outside, relatives chanted "náci gyilkosok" (Nazi murderers). Some said Csontos's sentence was too light and that the instigators should have been charged too (Index, 2013). Hundreds gathered at the courthouse; some wore T-shirts with the victims' photographs and the words "Their skin was their crime" (Al Jazeera). Eszter Jovanovics of TASZ called prejudice against Roma and the crimes it produced "the most serious human rights issue in Hungary." The Roma activist Aladár Horváth called the trial "third-rate" for largely ignoring the defendants' politics and the authorities' share of responsibility (ERRC). The judge was disciplined for missing the 60-day deadline for the written judgment, which reached the parties a year later and ran to more than 900 pages (Romea.cz, 2015).
All four appealed. The Budapest-Capital Regional Court of Appeal (Fővárosi Ítélőtábla) began its hearing on April 15, 2015, and announced its decision on May 8, 2015 (Romea.cz; 444; TASZ gives May 6). It rejected the claims of procedural violations, upheld the life sentences, and added a conviction for unlawful deprivation of liberty over the tying up of the hunter's family at Besenyszög. It found that the motive was hatred of Roma and that the victims were interchangeable to the killers. "A rasszista indítékból elkövetett, élet elleni cselekmények elkövetői a legsúlyosabb büntetést érdemlik," the presiding judge said (Those who commit acts against life out of racist motives deserve the most severe punishment) (444, 2015). Csontos's 13-year sentence became final.
Because the appeal court had added a crime, the three principals could take the case to a third instance. On January 12, 2016, after a marathon hearing at the Kúria, Hungary's supreme court, Árpád Kiss spent almost an hour of his final word listing what he called contradictions between expert reports. The Kiss brothers refused to hear the reasoning and were led out. Presiding Judge Róza Mészár said there had been irregularities at first instance, some corrected at the time and the rest on appeal, but "ezek a hibák nem voltak olyan súlyosak, hogy érdemben befolyásolják az ítéleteket" (these errors were not serious enough to materially affect the verdicts) (444, 2016; Romea.cz, 2016). "It is fortunate that more people did not die as a consequence of these attacks," she said. The life sentences without parole became final and could not be appealed further. TASZ criticized the oral ruling for never using the words Roma, anti-Gypsy or racist.
Árpád Kiss kept trying to reopen the case. On December 11, 2018, he asked for a retrial, claiming that his brother had fired the Mauser rifle at Tiszalök and that he himself was only an accomplice. The court rejected the motion on March 28, 2019, holding that a co-defendant could not be heard as a new witness (Vágvölgyi). In 2020 his lawyer, Edina Józsa, filed a new request suggesting that the Socialist government and the secret services of 2008 and 2009 had been involved; Kiss's earlier defense lawyer, Zsolt Bérdi, told Vágvölgyi he had no idea what those claims rested on. That year Kiss also wrote, in a letter reported by Infostart, that "circles close to Jobbik" had helped the group with tips and money. In May 2020 the NNI confirmed it had opened an investigation into possible instigators, financiers and accomplices (Infostart). No result of that investigation was found in the sources opened.
In an interview with the newspaper Magyar Nemzet published in August 2022, Árpád Kiss admitted the crimes for the first time. "A bűncselekmények megtörténtek, azokat mi követtük el," he said (The crimes happened, we committed them) (Telex). He said six people had planned and carried out the attacks, that the other two "got away with everything," that one later held a municipal post for Jobbik and that the other worked in a gun shop and supplied ammunition and cash. He also disputed that he had been the leader, as the courts had found, and said he had followed his brother. These are a convicted man's claims and have not been tested in court. Kiss also said the European Court of Human Rights had ruled the previous autumn that his life sentence must be reviewed after 25 years. No such ruling was located in this research, and the claim is given here only as his.
István Csontos was released on August 20, 2022 (ERRC).
The families waited years for help. In 2010, Zoltán Balog, then a state secretary, gave the families 8.5 million forints, which paid for rebuilding four homes with the Phralipe Independent Roma Organization. Government Decree 532/2013 (XII. 30.) set up special assistance for survivors and directly affected victims, and in 2014 the Ministry of Human Resources announced 70 million forints for more than 30 families, distributed on the advice of the victim support association Fehér Gyűrű (White Ring) and paid without waiting for a final verdict (Hungarian government; Justice Ministry answer, 2015). The ministry said that state bodies had hindered the investigation and the capture of the perpetrators in 2008 and 2009, and presented the payments as the government accepting responsibility. In February 2014 the payments had not yet arrived, and some families objected to unannounced visits from the association's questioners (Index, 2014). Romea.cz described the amounts as symbolic, several thousand euros each. As of January 2015, the Justice Ministry told parliament, no court had awarded damages to the victims or their relatives in either civil or criminal proceedings.
The Working Group Against Hate Crime, a coalition that includes TASZ, called for dedicated hate crime units in the police and prosecution service, internationally accepted investigation protocols, specialist training, effective protection for victims and a reliable hate crime statistics database (TASZ). Its recommendations were drawn directly from the failures in this case.
Remembrance has come mainly from Roma organizations and the city of Budapest. On the tenth anniversary in 2019, a plaque was to be unveiled in Budapest and staff of the Ministry of Human Resources laid a wreath at the Csorba graves (444). The Roma movement has proposed February 23 as an official day of remembrance; as of February 2026, the Budapest municipality and three city districts had adopted it, and national recognition was still pending (ERRC). Budapest Mayor Gergely Karácsony opened a photo exhibition in City Park in memory of the victims. The case was also the basis for Benedek Fliegauf's film Only the Wind and for Zoltán Tábori's book Romani Roulette (TASZ).
Other participants: Kiss says six men took part; Spiegel Online, cited by ERRC, reported that DNA showed two more people at the Besenyszög robbery and one of the killings. No one else has been charged, as of the latest sources.
Instigators and money: Gulyás's view that the group had financial and moral support, and Kiss's claims about Jobbik-linked figures, are unproven. The 2020 NNI investigation's outcome is not known from the sources opened.
Intelligence services: the lapse of NBH surveillance and Csontos's KBH link are established by official findings; whether either could have stopped the attacks is not.
Leadership: the courts named Árpád Kiss as the leader; he now disputes it.
Earlier attack: an attack on a Debrecen refugee camp in 2007 or 2008 has been linked to the group but was never proven in court (Romea.cz; Vágvölgyi).
As of the August 31, 2022 Telex report, Árpád Kiss, István Kiss and Zsolt Pető were serving life without parole and István Csontos had been released. No later source on their status was found in this research. The ERRC's February 2026 commemoration names the victims and reports the memorial-day campaign but says nothing new about the prisoners.
March 7, 2008: robbery at Besenyszög; guns taken from a hunter's family.
July 21, 2008: first charged attack, Galgagyörk.
August 8 and September 2008: attacks at Piricse, Nyíradony and Tarnabod; three Roma men wrongly held 11 months over Tarnabod.
November 3, 2008: József Nagy and Éva Nagy killed at Nagycsécs.
December 15, 2008: Krisztián Rontó shot at Alsózsolca.
February 23, 2009: Róbert Csorba and Robika Csorba killed at Tatárszentgyörgy; police first blame a short circuit.
April 22, 2009: Jenő Kóka killed at Tiszalök.
August 3, 2009: Mária Balogh killed at Kisléta; her daughter seriously wounded.
August 21, 2009: four men arrested in Debrecen.
September 2010: charges filed.
March 25, 2011: trial opens.
August 6, 2013: three life sentences without parole; 13 years for Csontos.
August 2013: military investigation into intelligence links ordered.
January 2014: 70 million forints in state support announced.
May 8, 2015: appeal court upholds the verdicts; Csontos's sentence final.
January 12, 2016: the Kúria makes the life sentences final.
March 28, 2019: Árpád Kiss's retrial motion rejected.
May 2020: NNI investigation into possible instigators and financiers.
August 20, 2022: Csontos released.
August 2022: Árpád Kiss admits the crimes in a prison interview.
February 23, 2026: 17th anniversary; as of the latest source, the three principals' status was last reported in August 2022.