November 28, 2005
According to state news wire MTI, 63-year-old Socialist MP Árpád
Urbán (right) was hunting in his northern constituency of
Balassagyarmat on Saturday when his 73-year-old brother mistook him
for a wild boar and shot him in the heart. The dead MP, who was an
expert on education and sports, joined Hungary's dominant leftist
party in 1989, during its last year as Hungary's sole legal political
party, and was apparently popular with his constituents and fellow
party members. Meanwhile, in an unrelated incident, a hunter shot and
killed "Red," one of Hungary's most celebrated hunting dogs, after
seeing the animal chase a cow and mistaking him for a stray.
Right-wing daily Magyar Nemzet reports that Red, who was worth an
estimated Ft 1 million (€4,000), was chasing a wounded Danish calf in
Homokszentgyörgy (Somogy County) on Tuesday afternoon when the tragedy
happened. The hunter felled the prized dog with one shot, even though
Red was wearing an orange safety collar. Red's owner, who was lead to
the dead animal by a satellite tracking device built into the collar,
reported the hunter to the police, who are investigating the
circumstances of the case with the help of unidentified "experts."
In an even odder twist, the headshot of Urbán on Parliament's
official website (above right) features an unexplained series of
blood-red splotches around his neck. (The page is here, but will
probably be taken down, so we've pasted a full-sized copy of the
spooky pic here.) Spookier still, according to a report on Index.hu,
some of Urbán's relatives believe there is a "curse" on the family,
because this was the second incident within the last decade in which a
relative accidentally killed one of their kin. In the previous
incident, a sibling of Urbán's was run over by their nephew. Police
are currently investigating the shooting.
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