A group from Slovakia went to St. Peter's Square with a large poster supporting Bishop Strickland right after he was cancelled to plead with the Pope to restore America s bishop to his diocese, but they were forbidden by police after the police checked with the Vatican. Not only was their poster stolen, but their photos and video were erased by the police.
00:05:16.420That is when one of the policemen confirmed that Bishop Strickland was indeed a problem in the Vatican.
00:05:22.980Another one told me yet later on, very silently, that this banner was a problem in the Vatican.
00:05:30.400And you can hear it in the recording very clearly.
00:05:33.040That was when they took away my camera.
00:05:35.980Another one later said the reason for all this trouble was political.
00:05:40.640Okay, so to get back to where I was, I asked my husband to give the banner to me, which he did, but this time the police were running out of patience, they took it away from me by force, stripped me of it, even though I said this was my property and I wanted to keep it.
00:06:19.940The police even tried to take our cameras by force, but I screamed, of course.
00:06:25.820I had filmed their faces, the way they would be limiting us, their behavior.
00:06:30.080So, they asked me to go in the car with them, but I said I would go to the police station on my own, not in their car.
00:06:39.900Of course, I thought I would go to the police station to get the banner back, but you see, I did not want to go with them because I was worried, and rightfully so, they would take the cameras and the footage away.
00:07:36.680Again, they said, I was not arrested, not suspicious of any wrongdoing whatsoever, so why more checking up?
00:07:44.780I mean, why go in their car right this minute?
00:07:49.260Naturally, it was because they wanted to get their hands on the footage right away, but they could not tell me that.
00:07:55.700You see, they would not let me leave with the camera, since the point was to delete what was on it, and in this way, not let the world see it.
00:08:09.240I was also told the police could do whatever they wanted, keep me for however long they wanted.
00:08:14.780They would only tell me the reasons for my detainment at the police station.
00:09:25.320I switched it on, so this is how I know for sure that the first bite, I mean, if I call it that, the scene in the street that took almost two hours, and after they abducted me until the release, it took over three more hours, close to three, between three to four.
00:09:42.760They had plenty of time to work on deleting those files.
00:09:46.620At first, they took me not even inside the police station.
00:09:52.100Remember how they had promised they would explain everything there?
00:09:56.040We only stopped there for close to half an hour.
00:09:59.200But I was not allowed to step out of the car, even though I kept begging them to let me go to the toilet.
00:10:04.500The answer was always, later, they took us away to a place where they incarcerate criminals, and took our fingerprints, our photos, you know, pictures of our faces.
00:10:15.660All the while, their people were diligently working on deleting all our precious files concerning this event.
00:10:23.900But, wait a minute, we've got lots of evidence of what did go on.
00:10:28.740And we're looking now at what you gave us as the evidence that they deleted files.
00:10:37.340The first screenshot, the dark one, shows the order of the files on the card in the camera.
00:10:43.620It is obvious that some numbers are missing in the sequence.
00:10:47.380They were deleting from the memory card at that time, I mean, while we were detained by the police.
00:10:52.980The second screenshot is from a professional data recovery software program, where an IT expert analyzed the memory card from the mirrorless camera and found that those files were indeed deleted in a very sophisticated and professional way.
00:11:10.780In such a way that the physical raw data on the card belonging to the deleted files were physically damaged, overwritten and bypassed several times, and thus definitely devalued so that they would not be restorable.
00:11:29.280The police apparently used a professional for this job.
00:11:32.660We were only able to recover four photos from that card, one of which captures that banner thrown away in the corner.
00:11:41.860That was an unprecedented police intervention in our journalistic work.
00:11:48.100How is it that we have some of these files?
00:11:50.520We were able to restore some photographs, but even an expert could not restore all of what they had deleted from the cameras.
00:12:18.900And I also had a tiny mic on, which was hidden under my blouse.
00:12:23.840So I had the sound of everything I experienced, and I can prove it.
00:12:28.580I want to play for you some of the evidence that Anna has.
00:12:36.800Brilliantly, you saved Anna the evidence by hiding one of the SD cards your husband did.
00:12:45.220And you had the information or the audio recordings from a hidden microphone that you were wearing.
00:12:54.960So let's play some of that evidence now, just so that you know.
00:12:58.080These are video that was able to be recovered from the one hidden SD card.
00:13:03.160Overlaying it is some of the audio that you'll hear from Anna's abduction, from their explanation.
00:13:11.640And a key piece of evidence is noted that the police are actually admitting that it is the poster that was deemed illegal by people in the Vatican.