The town of Poprad – a gateway to the region of the High Tatras in northern Slovakia – has been attracting the Italian underworld for many years. In March 2017 we went with Ján Kuciak to the most popular Slovak mountains to find out what lied behind. We started our investigation into the Italian organized...
Yesterday, Slovakia’s National Crime Agency seized a mobile phone belonging to investigative reporter Pavla Holcova from investigace.cz. Slovak police invited Pavla for an interview for what we believed was a friendly meeting to aid the investigation into the murder of Jan Kuciak. Yet they had already obtained a prosecutor’s order to seize the phone implying this...
As soon as journalists published the last investigation of their murdered colleague, Slovak reporter Jan Kuciak, they immediately focused on another important issue: Why was he killed? And how did his killers know that he was working on a story about them? The first answer was straightforward. Kuciak and his fiancée were murdered in their home in...
It started with just a name on a company registration form: Antonino Vadala. Because that name belonged to a man in business with Maria Troskova – a model turned businesswoman who became an assistant to Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico – reporters wanted to know more. That curiosity may have killed Slovak journalist Jan Kuciak along with...
When the bodies of journalist Jan Kuciak and his fiancé Martina Kusnirova, both 27, were found this Sunday – each killed by a single shot in their newly purchased home – Slovak journalists were shocked. Slovakia’s top politicians have recently been criticized for openly expressing hostility to independent journalists, but no reporter in the country...
In 2008, an attempt to decommission part of Albania’s aging, deadly stockpile of Cold War-era munitions went horribly wrong. At about noon on March 15, a series of explosions at a facility in the village of Gërdec sent fireballs into the sky, artillery shells into homes, and shockwaves slamming into the nearby capital, Tirana. The...