In addition to the fact that information from the investigation files was constantly leaked at the press conferences of the Direction-SD, the established system also led to frequent leaks towards the investigated and accused persons themselves. Some of them – Norbert Bödör, for example – knew about the state of the investigation. Bödör arrived at the police station just before the planned arrest with a new phone, the old one having disappeared. Similar situations were repeated. They also helped the suspects to escape – some had travelled suspiciously just before a warrant was issued for their arrest.
However, conspiracy games were also unleashed with the intention of removing investigators who worked on the most serious cases involving high-ranking persons. These were mainly serious crime investigators from the National Crime Agency. According to the press releases of the Smer-SD, the term ‘dickheads’, after the well-known investigator Ján Čurilla, began to be used for them, unfortunately also in the media and through the mouths of politicians from other political parties. This gave and still gives the public the impression of an organised criminal group, but unfortunately many people fell for the rhetorical campaign and still repeat the term.
The grand campaign, called the “war of the police”, concerned the recordings read out by Smer-SD at press conferences. As it later turned out, their transcription was manipulated by politicians from Fico’s party. Nevertheless, their distorted content has been and is repeated hundreds of times by politicians from Smer-SD in media appearances, and therefore a large part of the public considers them relevant.
Marián Kučerka and Jan Kaľavský are on the front line of the so-called war in the police. Both fled to Bosnia and Herzegovina. Slovakia is demanding their extradition, as they are both accused, but the Fico garnitura after 2023 and the information service that came after Matovic, Heger and Odor , writes to Bosnia that these are political trials and they should not be extradited despite the court’s decision.
A police inspection team, called Oblúk, began to act against the police officers who were investigating prominent members of the Direction-SD and their allies.
The team accused investigators from the crime agency of coercing witnesses to testify and the accused to confess. Some of the investigators so accused spent several weeks in custody, but the Regional Court released them from custody, finding that their prosecution was unfounded. However, the Inspectorate has still not closed the investigation into Jan Curilla and his colleagues. The situation is more complicated: this is not just a battle between the inspectorate and the crime agency unit. There are officials on both sides working for and against police freedom.
Peter Juhás, who led the investigation into the murders of Jan Kuciak and Martina Kušnírová, became head of the police inspectorate in 2023. Several former members of the National Criminal Agency were also charged, indicted and convicted in the Purgatory case.
Also charged is the former head of the entire elite police unit, Peter Hraško. So it cannot be said that one police unit is fighting against another. As a consequence of the incompetence of the Matovic government’s Interior Ministry, all the units were polarised, with people from the old structures remaining in each of them. In defence of the 2020-2023 government, it is possible to say that it was right not to interfere politically and probably impossible to filter out all police officials connected with the Fico system in such a short period of time.
The key figures of the war in the police, Kalyavsky and Kucherka, forwarded the above-mentioned recordings of private conversations to the Police Inspection Arc team. Both were members of elite units of the National Crime Agency and it is not known on whose instructions they recorded their colleagues. The whole operation involved a member of the Takács mafia group. As he admitted, he consulted with Kučerka and sometimes even tasked him.
Kaľavský was under the influence of Petr Košče, a businessman and a grey eminence of the Slovak Information Service. He is also accused of bribing special prosecutor Dusan Kovácik. In June 2023, Kaľavský was sentenced to seven years in prison by the Specialized Criminal Court for leaking information from the files; he warned others, including his colleague Kučerka, of the charges in advance. Kučerka escaped and also destroyed his mobile phone because he feared what its analysis would prove. However, his activities involved covering up many cases of people connected to the ruling Smer-SD. In July 2023, the Specialized Criminal Court and the Supreme Court of the Slovak Republic sentenced him to 10.5 years in prison and forfeiture of property. However, both Kučerka and Kaľavský escaped to Bosnia and Herzegovina thanks to the echo and cooperation of persons across the criminal system.
But back to their role in the so-called police war: Kucherko’s wife accused the Special Prosecutor’s Office prosecutors of sadism during the interrogation of her husband. Again, this was no coincidence, these were prosecutors in several sensitive cases of prominent people. It was therefore not surprising that Robert Fico himself repeatedly responded to her allegations with press conferences. Kučero’s wife’s submission went nowhere; on the contrary, she herself was investigated for suspicious financial operations. Yet her allegations have been repeated by politicians of the Direction-SD and its partners to this day.
“You realize that you have a family, that you have a wife who is in some kind of position, and either we do it with great shame, or we do it in such a way that it’s like nothing will happen,” came the recording, which was allegedly made by Kučerka himself and played and quoted in the media by politicians for Smer.
However, independent experts say the recording was manipulated. But because of it, the Police Inspectorate has taken up the case. However, in order to proceed officially, it had to have an expert opinion drawn up by the Institute of Criminalistics and Expertise of the Bratislava Police. The report was not to the liking of Kučerka and the representatives of the Direction-SD. The opinion stated that its quality and composition were not sufficiently relevant, it showed signs of manipulation and it was not clear that it was truly authentic and unedited. In the end, it was revealed that the Direction-SD representatives had prepared their own mix, combining different parts of the recordings to make them sound a certain way.
In 2021, on the instructions of the Oblúk police inspection team, led by Diana Santus, Ján Kaľavský recorded colleagues while they were working and tried to ask them various misleading questions. From the answers, Směr-SD created its own mixes and at press conferences, for example, played and played a passage of investigator Ďurka saying “(…) the resolution on the opening is not (unintelligible words), there we write what we want.” However, the entire recording, which was transcribed as part of the testimony, showed that the investigator said the exact opposite: “The director told me that the opening resolution, it’s not a letter to Santa Claus, we write what we want there.” Thus, the investigator pointed out that the accusation cannot be fabricated at will, but the Direction-SD, including Fico himself, presented and present the exact opposite.
Although the recordings were proven to have been manipulated, the investigators were sufficiently spat upon in public, and most of the public still believes what Direction-SD says about their methods. Even though the court made it clear that the investigators in the recordings were wrongly accused, they are still out of office to this day and the Attorney General’s Office has refused to close their case for years. The authors of the recordings, Kučerka and Kaľavský, are hiding from justice in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Two successive heads of the Slovak Information Service have also been accused of joining an organised group to implicate investigators in high-profile cases. The conspiracy game worked – the investigators targeted by the game are off duty and the public believes what Fico and his entourage repeat. After the political turnaround, they continue to damage the entire system of investigation, but more on that in the next lines.
If we mention the defections to Bosnia, it is necessary to add another name – the former director of the counter-intelligence of the Slovak Information Service, Peter Gašparovič, has joined the party of Kaľavský and Kučerko. He was convicted, along with police officer Ladislav Vičan, for taking bribes in exchange for unblocking the assets of the Bopal company. The blocking was the result of audits of Bopal’s opaque tax operations. The head of the company bought information from the corruptors on how to access the blocked money. Dozens, if not hundreds, of pages could be written in connection with this case and others that members of the Information Service have handled. However, their entire work will not fit into the History of Corruption.
