The 71-year-old man who tried to assassinate the Slovak prime minister has been charged with attempted murder. The case will now be investigated as a terrorist attack.
Slovak authorities have reclassified the attempted assassination of Prime Minister Robert Fico and will now investigate a terrorist attack rather than an attempted murder, the Slovak prosecutor’s office announced on Thursday.
Fico is recovering from serious injuries sustained when he was shot four times at close range on May 15 while greeting supporters in the central town of Handlova.
Slovakia’s Prime Minister Robert Fico shot dead
Following the attack, the suspected shooter, identified by Slovak media as 71-year-old poet Juraj Cintula, was charged with premeditated attempted murder and remanded in custody.
“In light of the evidence obtained, the act under consideration will be legally classified as a particularly serious terrorist offence,” said Slovak Attorney General Maros Zilinka in a statement cited by the Spanish news agency EFE.
A spokeswoman for the prosecutor’s office, Zuzana Drobova, told French news agency AFP that the suspect was informed on Thursday “that this is now a particularly serious crime of terrorist attack.”
Fico, 59, leads a three-way coalition made up of his populist centrist Smer-SD party, the centrist Hlas party and the far-right SNS party.
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Following the attack, he underwent two lengthy operations at a hospital in the central Slovak town of Banska Bystrica and was flown to the capital Bratislava on May 31 for treatment at home.
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The suspect, a member of the Slovak Writers’ Association, later said he had no intention of killing the prime minister, calling him a “messenger of evil” from the “failed opposition” in the country.
Fico was sworn in as prime minister in late October for the fourth time. He had resigned in 2018, following protests over the murder of journalist Jan Kuciak, who was investigating Italian mafia activities in the country. The new appointment was surrounded by controversy and criticism over Fico’s pro-Russian stance regarding Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
Source: Observadora
