The murder of a Slovak journalist and his fiancé goes to court for the third time. From Based in Bohemia.
There is a terrifying detail about the murder of Slovak investigative journalist Jan Kuciak. Something that made my blood run cold when I first heard it.
Kuciak had been writing about organized crime and corruption. About how the tentacles of Italy’s ‘Ndrangheta mafia were feeling their way into Slovakia’s political and judicial system.
But Kuciak wasn’t knocking on doors or meeting shady figures in dark alleys.
He was sitting behind his laptop, drafting emails to the Slovak authorities and filing freedom of information requests.
It seems someone in the state administration was quietly registering these requests. And someone was tipping off the people he was asking about.
This week, eight years on, the Specialized Criminal Court began examining the murder of Kuciak and his fiancé Martina Kusnirova for the third time.
The retrial is a full evidentiary hearing with a new panel of judges. They will revisit the evidence that has convicted the foot soldiers and intermediaries but twice acquitted the man accused of ordering the murder – the influential businessman Marian Kocner.
It may take a year or longer to reach a verdict.
At the offices of Aktuality.sk, Kuciak’s old employer, the small shrine on the ground floor has been replaced by a picture on the opposite wall.
It’s the same image I remember seeing everywhere when I first arrived in Bratislava a few days after the murders in February 2018.
You don’t see it so often these days.
Kuciak’s former boss Peter Bardy is slimmer than when we last met in 2020, a few days before Slovaks were due to go to the polls for the first time since the murders.
He’s tanned. The salt-and-pepper beard suits him.
He’s also, he tells me, finally reconciled to the fact that he was unable to protect his reporter from the hired killers sent to murder him (the awful chronology is set out here by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project).
Kuciak’s parents and Kusnirova’s mother have helped him overcome the sense of responsibility that plagued him after the killing, he says.
Kuciak’s old desk is no longer the place of hushed reverence I remember on my first visit to Aktuality.sk. It’s just a desk.
In fact for a moment Bardy has to think which one it was.
After I leave Aktuality.sk, weighed down with signed copies of the books Bardy has written on the Slovak prime minister, Robert Fico, and former President Zuzana Caputova, I take the bus back to the city center and head for Namestie SNP (Slovak National Uprising Square).
I look for the memorial to Kuciak and Kusnirova installed in 2022 on the facade of a Baroque building belonging to the Brothers Hospitallers, a Catholic religious order.
It takes a while to find it. SNP Square is a building site at the moment, one of several ambitious remodeling projects underway in the capital.
Pedestrians scurry through corridors formed by sheets of green plastic netting, treading gingerly over frozen mud and gravel.
The memorial has been partially dismantled to protect it from the diggers, causing some upset. The city authorities promise it will go back up again once the work is complete.
Later, I meet a contact for lunch at a trendy bistro on Namestie slobody, or Freedom Square. I decide against the heart-stopping Slovak national dish halusky and opt for pasta instead.
I gaze at the opposite side of the square and the grand 17th-century palace that serves as the headquarters of the Slovak government.
I remember the mass demonstrations in front of the building in the wake of the murders, an event that convulsed Slovak society and soon cost the man inside it – Prime Minister Robert Fico – his job.
But he’s back now.
And he’s not alone.
Tibor Gaspar, who stepped down as police chief after Kuciak’s killing and whom many accuse of not doing enough to protect him, is now a parliamentary deputy for Fico’s Smer party. His son Pavol runs Slovakia’s domestic intelligence service. He has a tattoo of his father on one arm and the consigliere from The Godfather on the other (which is not a crime).
Robert Kalinak, who resigned as interior minister after the shooting, is now minister of defense. He also has a stake in a small private arms manufacturer. The Slovak defense sector is thriving from exports of weapons and ammunition, particularly to Ukraine.
Robert Fico returned as premier in late 2023. He lashes out at the liberal opposition and the media with great vitriol and fury. The attempt on his life in May 2024 has left significant physical – and, critics claim – psychological damage. He’s a different man.
But it’s easy to forget – and almost trite to point out – that at the heart of this story is a simple human tragedy.
Kuciak was a diligent and talented journalist. Kusnirova was a well-respected archaeologist. They were killed in the house they were planning to renovate.
It happened three months before they were due to get married.
Their last texts and phone calls were about the reception.
Kusnirova was buried in her wedding dress.
Rob Cameron is a journalist and broadcaster based in Prague. He is the BBC correspondent for the Czech Republic and Slovakia and is a regular contributor to Deutsche Welle, ORF, RTE, and Monocle Radio. This article originally appeared on his Substack “Based in Bohemia” and is republished by permission.
