- Peter Tóth began to cooperate with the police on September 27, 2018 after the arrest of the murderers.
- Tóth contacted the police presidium and then Branislav Zurian.
- Alena Zsuzsová asked Tóth whether Marian Kočner had started cooperating with the police.
At Tuesday’s main hearing of the Specialized Criminal Court (ŠTS) in Pezinok, witness Peter Tóth described the circumstances under which he began cooperating with the police in the case of the murder of journalist Ján Kuciak. He decided to cooperate on September 27, 2018, that is, on the day of the arrest of the perpetrators of the murder.
He contacted the Presidium of the Police Force and subsequently met with Branislav Zurian, then head of the anti-crime unit of the National Criminal Agency (NAKA). He added that he completed the first official interrogation on October 5, 2018.
Tóth explained that shortly after the arrest of the perpetrators of the murder, Alena Zsuzsová sent him a huge number of messages in which she was interested in whether Marian Kočner had a new lawyer, a new fellow inmate, a new member of the Prison and Judicial Guard Corps with whom she was in contact in the last month before the arrest of the suspects in the murder of Ján Kuciak.
Or whether some new policeman is after him. The witness deduced from this that Alena Zsuzsová is finding out from him whether Marian Kočner has started cooperating with the law enforcement authorities in the matter of the murder.
At the beginning of cooperation with the police, Tóth demanded to be a secret witness. He criticized that journalists revealed his identity in a short time. He also pointed out that Zurian operationally “extracted” him at the time. He did not rule out that he handed him materials from the so-called paparazzi of journalists even before he gave them to the police in a procedural way. They could also include Tóth’s written statements so that Zurian could better orientate himself in the materials.
“I assumed that from his position he communicates with the investigator, or with the prosecutors of the Special Prosecutor’s Office. And that he informs them in an appropriate way about our contacts,” he added.
On Monday (June 22), Tóth spoke about the circumstances of the acquisition of suspicion against the defendants Marian Kočner and Alena Zsuzsová in the matter of ordering Kuciak’s murder. Ultimately, he said, this suspicion led him to contact law enforcement. He identified “education for absolute respect for human life” as the motive for contacting the police.
In the case of the murder of Kuciak from February 2018, in which his fiancee Martina Kušnírová also died in Veľká Mača (Galanta district), the couple Kočner and Zsuzsová are facing indictment from 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 Kracina also faces indictment for preparing the murders of prosecutors and Darko Dragić. 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.
