Eight years after the murders that convulsed Slovakia and toppled a government, the trial of investigative journalist Ján Kuciak and his fiancée Martina Kušnírová delivered its most explosive testimony yet on Monday, with key witness Zoltán Andruskó alleging that former police chief Tibor Gašpar threatened him with death and reaffirming that oligarch Marian Kočner ordered the killings.
Andruskó, escorted into the Bratislava courtroom with a hood covering his head, testified that Gašpar warned him to "stay silent, because I would end up like murdered Bašternák"—a reference to another killing that has haunted Slovak public life. The allegation places Slovakia's former top law enforcement official at the center of what increasingly appears to have been systematic state capture by organized crime interests.
"The message from Tibor Gašpar was clear," Andruskó told the court, according to Slovak public broadcaster STVR. Gašpar has denied the accusations, claiming he had never encountered Andruskó before the trial proceedings began.
<h2>From Prosecutor to Journalist: The Evolution of a Murder Plot</h2>
Perhaps most chilling was Andruskó's revelation about the original target. He testified that Kočner initially wanted to kill Maroš Žilinka—now Slovakia's prosecutor general—who was then overseeing criminal cases against the oligarch. The murder was to be executed as a "mafia-style hit" designed to create a major scandal and instill fear, Andruskó said.
But the plan changed. According to the witness, intermediary Alena Zsuzsová proposed that killing journalist Kuciak would be "simpler" because he lacked the protection afforded to a prosecutor. Andruskó described being shown folders containing dozens of photographs and detailed surveillance records of Kuciak's movements—evidence of the <em>professional tracking</em> that preceded the February 2018 double murder.
In Central Europe, as we learned from the Velvet Revolution, quiet persistence often achieves more than loud proclamations. But the Kuciak case revealed that persistence alone cannot protect journalists investigating the intersection of political power and organized crime—not when the institutions meant to safeguard them have themselves been compromised.
