Jan Kuciak was tailed. An Italian scoop

This fact was revealed by Italian RAI TV news Tg1‘s correspondent Maria Grazia Mazzola who published the photos and the hitherto unpublished content of a phone call

Jan Kuciak had been tailed, spied upon, and secretly photographed with a telephoto lens in the days preceding his barbaric assassination and that of his girlfriend, Martina Kusnirova, on February 21st 2018. The photos of the tailing were revealed by Maria Grazia Mazzola, dispatched to Bratislava by Tg1, in an exclusive report for the TV7 programme of Tg1 broadcast on February 1st by RAI. The scoop was picked up by all the Slovak newspapers and it made clear how stalled the magistracy’s investigations are one year after the assassination that shook the whole of Europe.

The investigations are clearly deadlocked to ascertain the responsibilities of the government authorities who did not guarantee the journalist’s safety by providing him with adequate protection, even though he had reported receiving threats. And even the investigations to bring those who commissioned the crime to justice seem to be failing.

Last autumn, the four perpetrators of the double homicide had been identified and suspicions were raised about the possible instigator, the controversial Slovakian entrepreneur Marian Kocner, to whose opaque businesses Kuciak had dedicated his articles. Kocner has been accused of tax fraud and state fraud, but not of the Kuciak murder.

Maria Grazia Mazzola also reported the content of a threatening phone call from Marian Kocner to Jan Kuciak. The entrepreneur tells him: “you’re good, but why do you have to stick your nose in my business?” He adds peremptorily: “Now that is enough” and insinuates that he would react poorly. The following is the key phrase from the transcription of the phone call also published by the Slovak online news service Aktuality.ski. Kocner says: “Now it is I who will begin to take an interest in you, your mother, father, brothers, neighbours and I will publish everything I find about you”.

At the memorial ceremony that took place on 21st February 2019 in Bratislava, Josef Kuciak, Jan’s father, said: “The investigations went ahead, but they stopped after the arrest of the four accused of being the material executors of murder, as if someone wanted to prevent the solution of the case “.

The whole world awaits full justice and like Jan’s father keeps an eye on the Bratislava authorities.

ASP (wt)