- Throughout the summer of 2018, Peter Tóth transmitted messages between Kočner and Zsuzsová.
- After the September arrests, Alena Zsuzsová bombarded him with questions via the Threema application.
- Tóth deduced from her reports that he was concerned about Kočner’s possible cooperation with the police.
Former member of the Slovak Information Service (SIS) Peter Tóth spoke at Monday’s main hearing of the Specialized Criminal Court (ŠTS) in Pezinok about the circumstances of the acquisition of suspicion against the defendants to Marian Kočner a Alone Zsuzsovej in the matter of the murder of journalist Ján Kuciak. This suspicion eventually led to Tóth contacting law enforcement. His testimony before the court continues.
Tóth stated, among other things, that throughout the summer of 2018, he ensured the transfer of information between Alena Zsuzsová and Marian Kočner, who was in custody at the time as part of the TV bills case. However, according to him, the entire communication was almost meaningless. He was in contact with Alena Zsuzsová via the Threema application.
He identified September 2018 as an important moment, when several persons were arrested in connection with Kuciak’s murder. Including Zoltán Andruskó, Miroslav Marček and Tomáš Szabó.
“As soon as the news appeared in the Internet news media, Alena Zsuzsová contacted me via the Threema application, and she wrote to me very urgently to the effect that, in the last month before the arrest of the suspects in the murder of Ján Kuciak, Marian Kočner had a new lawyer, a new fellow inmate, a new member of the Prison and Judicial Guard Corps, with whom she comes into contact. Or whether some new policeman is coming after him,” said the witness.
According to him, she sent him a huge number of such messages during the day. “Quite logically, I deduced from this that Alena Zsuzsová is finding out from me whether Marian Kočner has started cooperating with the law enforcement authorities in the matter of the murder,” he added.
After a media report about the “detention of a female person in Komárno in connection with Kuciak’s murder”, he became suspicious that the detained person was a person appearing under the alias SIS Alino, with whom he communicated. That is, Alena Zsuzsová.
He pointed to the subsequent phone calls with Marian Kočner, who, according to him, started making an alibi for the period before February 2018, when the journalist was murdered. He evaluated the phone call from the defendant with a request to find out when the signature sheets for the creation of the Cieľ party were submitted as “that Marian Kočner is trying to find a logical explanation for the fact that he communicated intensively with Alena Zsuzsová at the critical time before the murder.” The witness also spoke about the circumstances of the meeting with attorney Andrej Šabík and Jozef Dučák Sr. or about the so-called paparazzi of journalists.
In the case of Kuciak’s murder from February 2018, in which his fiancee Martina Kušnírová also died in Veľká Mača in the Galanta district, Marian Kočner and Alena Zsuzsová are facing indictment on her order. The Supreme Court of the Slovak Republic annulled the previous two judgments. The case was brought to the ŠTS for the third time. The perpetrators of the murder, Miroslav Marček and Tomáš Szabó, had earlier received 25-year non-parole sentences, the intermediary of the murder, Zoltán Andruskó, had received 15 years of non-parole.
In addition to Marian Kočner and Alena Zsuzsová, Dušan K. and Darko D. are facing indictment for preparing the murders of the prosecutors. According to the indictment, the order for the murders of Maroš Žilinka and Daniel Lipšic should have arrived in autumn 2017. In the case of Petr Šufliarske in 2018. However, they were not implemented. Szabó has been legally convicted since 2022, who confessed to the preparation of the murders.
