BUDAPEST, Hungary (AP) – A political consulting firm posted the names of 19 agents and informants of Hungary’s communist secret police on a Web site Friday, and it threatened to list more.

Earlier this month in Poland, a leak of communist-era secret police files containing the names of 240,000 former agents, informers and secret service employees caused an uproar because the list included the names of victims without distinguishing them as such.

The names of the 19 Hungarians posted on the Web site of the Political Capital Institute already had been identified by Hungary’s media. The institute said it only held back on listing 97 other names after the state ombudsman for data protection questioned the legality of such a move.

“We are considering releasing the other names even if it means facing legal sanctions,” the consultancy’s director, Krisztian Szabados, told The Associated Press.

The 19 names included politicians, journalists, a former police commander, a theater critic, rock musicians, writers, economists and a current member of the European Parliament.

Their ranks varied widely, from lowly informants to high-placed secret agents, as did their degree of involvement with the secret police.

Szabolcs Fazakas, a former minister and currently a member of the European Parliament, collaborated with the Interior Ministry and other agencies. Laszlo Salgo – a former national police chief now working for the European Union’s police agency, Europol – was an officer in charge of analyzing information gathered by the secret services in the 1980s.

The other 97 names were compiled with the help of people who have access to secret police files that have been handed over to the Historical Archives, Szabados said.

In keeping with an earlier promise, deputies of the governing Socialist Party last week submitted a draft law aiming to further open the secret police files, some of which already are accessible to researchers and those about whom information was gathered.

But the Socialist proposal was met with skepticism because it contained a loophole allowing the state security services to block access to any files still in their possession.

Fifteen years after the end of communism in Hungary, no lists of agents and informants have been officially released.

AP-ES-02-11-05 1109EST

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