A Journalist’s Undying Legacy

Two years have passed since investigative journalist Ján Kuciak and his fiancée, Martina Kušnírová, were gunned down in cold blood in their home south of Bratislava.

Kuciak had devoted his life to exposing crime and corruption in his native Slovakia, uncovering fraud after fraud in his reporting for local news outlet Aktuality.sk. At the time of his death, he was investigating how the Italian mafia had infiltrated the country’s political system.

The murder of the young couple, both just 27 when they died, was a watershed moment for Slovakia. Tens of thousands of people flooded the streets in protest, calling for a “decent Slovakia” for themselves and their children. The demonstrations set off a chain reaction that toppled senior government figures and forced the head of the police force to resign. The case also heralded the unexpected election of a liberal president, Zuzana Čaputová, a former environmental lawyer. Her first act as president-elect was to visit a streetside shrine commemorating Ján and Martina.

Five people have now been charged in connection with the deaths, including the notorious Slovakian businessman Marian Kočner, who is accused of masterminding the assassinations. But there remain unanswered questions about what other powerful figures may have known. We will keep trying to answer them.

At OCCRP, we are committed to the principle that even if you kill a journalist, you can never kill a story. This page brings together our investigations into Ján’s murder, our efforts to complete the journalistic work he left unfinished, and our coverage of the trial of his alleged killers.

It will also provide a locus for future stories pulled from a vast trove of data collected by police while investigating the murders — including files from Kočner’s phone and computer, where he kept damning evidence of blackmail, extortion, and bribery. We spent months working to safely process and catalogue this data. Now, it is freely available to journalists in an archive in Bratislava we are calling the Kočner Library. In an irony Ján might have appreciated, his death has granted Slovakian reporters unprecedented access to information on the kind of backdoor dealings he spent his career trying to understand.

OCCRP’s first story drawing on this material, written with our Slovakian and Czech member centers, offers an in-depth look at how Kočner used cash and kompromat to keep Slovakia’s justice system in his thrall.

Ján and Martina are no longer here, but the stories he told — and the stories still emerging about how the couple were murdered — will not be allowed to die.