Imagine reading that your husband or brother who has been held in a squalid Romanian prison for years is finally going to be released.
You make the long journey to the prison and stand outside the prison gates, waiting desperately for the moment you’ll be reunited with your loved one, only to hear… ‘April Fools! No one’s being released!’
This experience happened to sixty people in April 2000 who read in the Opinia newspaper that their loved ones were going to be released from the Baia Mare prison in Romania.
They made the long journey to the prison, only to learn that the paper had played an April Fool’s joke on them. The Opinia later published an apology.