2024-04-18 02:53:09
Two prosecutors from the already abolished elite unit of the Slovak prosecutor’s office, who last represented the state, for example, in the case of the murder of journalist Ján Kuciak, which has not yet been concluded in court, are giving up their positions at the end of June. Both prosecutors, Matúš Harkabus and Daniel Mikuláš, unsuccessfully requested to be transferred to the regional prosecutor’s office in Žilina, where they worked in the past, after the dissolution of the elite unit in March.
In a letter to the general prosecutor, Harkabus criticized the conditions at the prosecutor’s office and compared them to the period of normalization in communist Czechoslovakia.
The Prosecutor’s Office in Slovakia is a hierarchically managed institution, in which its head, Maroš Žilinka, has the most powerful position.
The case of Kuciak’s murder was originally handled by other prosecutors. One of them retired in the meantime, another to the European Public Prosecutor’s Office.
In the six-year-old case of Kuciak’s murder, in which his girlfriend was also shot, the courts in Slovakia previously sentenced three defendants, including the shooter himself.
Last year, in a new trial, the court of first instance again acquitted Marian Kočner of the charge of ordering the murder of the reporter, on the contrary, found Kočner’s acquaintance Alena Zsuzsová guilty of arranging this crime. This verdict is not final, the case is being re-examined by the Slovak Supreme Court, which already in 2021 annulled the acquittal verdict of the lower court against Kočner and Zsuzsová.
Most recently, the court of first instance connected the case of Kuciak’s murder, among other things, with the preparation of the unfinished murder of Žilinka, from the time when Žilinka was a prosecutor of the Slovak Prosecutor’s Office.
The abolition of the elite prosecutor’s office, which was created roughly 20 years ago to fight organized crime and the most serious criminal cases, was enforced by the current Slovak government. Prime Minister Robert Fico called the department a hotbed of evil and human rights violations.
The office also supervised the investigation of various cases from the time of Fico’s party, the Direction of Social Democracy. After the abolition of the office, the management of the prosecutor’s office transferred only a part of the former elite prosecutors to its criminal department, others ended up in other departments of the general prosecutor’s office.
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Spotlight Aktuálně.cz – Milan Kňažko | Video: The Spotlight Team