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 crime in Slovakia from scratch. In the beginning, we met with Italian and Czech experts on criminal activities and they told us that they knew nothing about Italian organized crime groups in Slovakia. However, thanks to our own research, we found an exception – Poprad...
Investigations
OCCRP: Slovak Police Must Return Reporter’s Seized Phone Immediately
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 was their intention when they lured Pavla to the meeting. Pavla had been working with Jan on behalf of OCCRP when he was murdered. She had previously helped police by telling them what she knew. Jan was her friend and Pavla was motivated to find...
Freedom of Information Law: Reporter’s Best Friend or Killer?
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 late February by one or more professional hitmen. Police and his colleagues believe that this can only be because of a story he was working on or had worked on. Journalists and police have a number of suspects, and the investigation is ongoing. The second...
Italian Farms, Slovak Soil
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 his fiancée. Both were found shot to death last weekend, plainly at the hands of a professional hitman. But Kuciak and his partners – the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) and the Czech Center for Investigative Journalism (CCIJ) – had realized they found...
Ján Kuciak and Our Last Unfinished Investigation
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 has ever before been killed for their work. Police said that the couple had been killed by one or more professional hitmen and that their deaths were likely in retaliation for one of Kuciak’s stories. Slovak media speculated wildly that the youthful Kuciak had been...
War Dog Millionaire: Czech Companies Bought Tens of Millions of Old Ammunition
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 disaster killed at least 26 people. But Albania’s tragedy turned out to be a business opportunity for two rival Czech companies. Interviews and documents obtained by OCCRP show that, by prompting the Albanian government to unload its dangerous Communist-era munitions, the catastrophe opened the way for Czech...