NEW YORK—The Slovakian police have arrested seven people for their alleged involvement in the murder of investigative reporter Jan Kuciak and his fiancée, Martina Kušnírova. Kuciak, whose focus was political corruption, was investigating the relationship between top Slovakian politicians and the Italian mafia.
Slovakia’s chief of police, Tibor Gašpar, maintained that Kuciak was killed in retaliation for his work. Among the detained are Antonino Badala, an Italian whose business Kuciak exposed, and two of his relatives.
Kuciak and Kušnírova, who were both 27 years old, were found dead last Sunday in his family home in Veľká Mača. They had been shot in the chest and in the head, respectively. Kuciak’s colleagues at Aktuality, the Slovakian investigative website for which he worked, said that he was about to publish a series of articles that documented the fraudulent funding of some Slovakian-based Calabrese criminal groups through EU transfer funds. Aktuality and other Slovakian sites published the unfinished articles yesterday.
This is the first time a journalist has been murdered in the Slovak Republic since its establishment in 1993. Last October, another investigative reporter, Daphne Caruana Galizia, was murdered in a car bomb attack in Malta after exposing multiple corruption cases that involved the island’s government. Four other journalists have been killed in various circumstances in Europe since the beginning of 2017.
Photo: Jan Kuciak and Martina Kušnírova / Reporters Without Borders.
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