The story of their family was and is also linked to the tragedy that for a time cost Fico the reins of power. At the end of February 2018, the Slovak and soon foreign media were flooded with news of the murder of the 27-year-old journalist Ján Kuciak and his fiancée Martina Kušnírová. The poignancy of the news lay in the nature of Kuciak’s work. The journalist was writing about Slovak politicians and the mafia.
The shocking act happened in the village of Veľká Mača, about 60 kilometres from Bratislava. Kuciak had bought a house in the village just before the murder and had spent the last few months renovating it on his own. The house could be accessed by an access road guarded by a police camera, but also by an unguarded back dirt road. As later proved in court, a pair of hitmen surprised the young couple on the evening of 21 February 2018. In addition to the perpetrators, two of the client’s liaisons were convicted. However, despite the evidence and testimony, the probable orderer, Marian Kocner, had not been convicted for the deed at the time of writing.
In order to get an idea of the group that prepared the horrible deed in the dark days of Slovakia, we can cite other cases in which reasonably suspicious figures in the case were brought to trial and convicted. Unsurprisingly, this was in the period after the fall of the Fico hegemony.
Murder of the ex-premier of Hurbanov
The former mayor of Hurbanov, László Basternák, was murdered in 2010. Only the murderer, Štěpán Kaluze, was convicted, but the police did not even charge the remaining actors at the time. It was only after the murder of Jan Kuciak that the investigation into the liquidation of the regional politician was revived. At the beginning of 2019, the police arrested Roman Ostružlík and Vladimír Mosnár. The murder of the politician before the elections by shooting in the backyard of his family home was mediated by Alena Zsuzsová, who was also convicted as a mediator in the Kuciak case.
The courts have now sentenced Roman Ostružlík and Alena Zsuzsová as the principals and Vladimír Mosnár as the facilitator to 21 years in prison. The murderer Kaluz is serving a 25-year sentence.
Zsuzsová, allegedly in collaboration with Kočner, was also supposed to have handled another big order – the killing of several key prosecutors who worked on sensitive cases involving politicians and the mafia. The order was in the running during the same period when Ján Kuciak was murdered. It can therefore be assumed that it was the conviction of the masterminds of the murder plan that they would eliminate a large number of problematic persons in one stroke and thus intimidate the rest. Everything was interrupted only because of the uproar and international pressure caused by the murder of a journalist.
As far as Marian Kočner is concerned, it is necessary to mention another case for which he is now behind bars. This too was only solved after the murder of Kuciak and the change in political leadership. Kočner, together with the former director of the television station Markíza and ex-politician Pavel Rusk, forged promissory notes that forced the television station to go to court for years.
The scammers wanted to extort tens of millions of euros from the private TV station. In short, it was a vaguely worded reimbursement of an unknown benefit that Russia wanted to extract from the television, knowing that it would end up there. Kocner devised and prepared the whole scheme. The case also involved Kočner’s former business partner and SIS officer Štefan Agh. The amount of money involved was almost 70 million euros, or almost two billion crowns. Kočner and Russia were sentenced to 19 years, with Kočner also receiving a fine of 10,000 euros. Stefan Agh walked away with a lighter sentence of 13 years.
The investigation into the murder of Ján Kuciak and Martina Kušnírová or the games surrounding it are worth writing a book on their own. However, we will recall the atmosphere, the journalist’s work and the political circumstances of the tragedy.
The media were surprised by the version presented by Prime Minister Robert Fico at a meeting with selected journalists. He leaked the news that three cups of coffee had been found at the murder scene and implied a link to the narco-trafficking. The rumour, spread by the Prime Minister and then Interior Minister Robert Kaliňák, led to speculation that the couple may have let the killer or killers into the house voluntarily, or even knew him. However, none of this has been confirmed by police, the mother of the murdered woman reportedly saw only two cups at the scene, and critics have branded Fico a conspirator. Fico’s press conference is also legendary, where he stood next to a masked man with a machine gun and a pile of banknotes worth a million euros, which he promised to anyone who would help uncover the killers. Cynicism, immobility and demonstrations of power were typical of the Fico government of the time. The promised reward also made the work of the police more difficult, who were accumulating false leads from profiteering whistleblowers or fortune-tellers and psychics.
A few hours after the victims were discovered, Róbert Krajmer, a high-ranking police officer and head of NAKA’s anti-corruption unit, was among the first to arrive at the crime scene where the murdered couple were found. This was unusual because the murders were not within his remit. Moreover, Krajmer is close to the oligarch Norbert Bödör, as Ján Kuciak also reported. At the time of the murder, the journalist even had a dossier on Krajmer’s suspected assets.
