 Trifa contested the decision with the Supreme Administrative Court, which put off his actual deportation for several years.The deportation was still in progress when Valerian Trifa died at the age of 72, in a Cascais hospital, during emergency treatment for a heart attack.Beginning in the late 1980s, Ion Mihai Pacepa, a former general in the communist secret police (the Securitate) who defected to the United States, claimed that Trifa had been the victim of a frameup engineered by his former colleagues.