Slovakian journalism’s darkest day – POLITICO
▻https://www.politico.eu/article/jan-kuciak-gorilla-slovakia-journalist-dead-darkest-day
Even during the turbulent and lawless decade that followed the end of communism in 1989, no reporter was ever killed in Slovakia. Beaten and threatened, yes — on multiple occasions. But never executed with a single bullet to the heart or head, as befell Slovak journalist Ján Kuciak and his fiancée Martina Kušnírova in their home late last week.
Ján, 27, was a talented investigative journalist whose focus was politically-related fraud. We first came into contact in 2012, as he was finishing his bachelor’s degree in journalism at a university in Nitra, about an hour from Bratislava. I had just been fired from my job with a business weekly and was being very publicly sued for my reporting on the Gorilla file, a high-level #corruption story dating back to 2006.
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In the past year our roles reversed: I moved to Canada, and it was he who made crucial progress on another story we had both independently been pursuing, the fraudulent payment of EU transfer funds to Italian nationals resident in Slovakia and with alleged ties to the ‘Ndrangheta, the organized crime group from Calabria.
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As every journalist knows, the most dangerous part of the job always arrives just before publication, when the subject of your exposé knows you are working on him and has a brief window of time to avoid being accused by name. No one knows, at this moment, if this calculation was in fact behind Ján and Martina’s murder. But Slovak organized crime has never killed reporters, even in the bad old days. Whereas Italy’s mafia gangs have shown no such compunctions.
Slovak police chief Tibor Gašpar has said Ján’s murder is probably related to his work.