- Peter Tóth confirmed that he ordered the surveillance of Ján Kuciak on the instructions of Marian Kočner.
- Tóth mediated the role to Miroslav Kriak.
- Kriak was handing Tóth the monitoring outputs on USB keys.
- The surveillance involved around 20 people, including journalists, politicians and prosecutors.
- Tóth stated that the outputs from the surveillance were to be used for the Na pranieri project.
Witness Peter Tóth testified at Wednesday’s main hearing of the Specialized Criminal Court (ŠTS) in Pezinok about the surveillance of journalist Ján Kuciak from October 2017. He confirmed that he received the request from the defendant Marian K. and entrusted Miroslav Kriak and his team with “paparazzi”.
“I definitely entered it indirectly at a personal meeting with Mr. Kriak. We always met for such a purpose in a cafe on the corner of Tomášikova and Mierová streets in Bratislava. Near the financial directorate, where Kriak was assigned at the time,” clarified Tóth.
The witness told Kriak that it was Kuciak, who at the time worked as a journalist at Aktuality and verbally provided him with basic information from photographed lustration diagrams. “Kriak usually wrote it down and then knew what to do,” he pointed out. Later, he could also provide him with information about Kuciak’s real residence, which he had from Marian Kočner.
He added that Kriak always gave him the monitoring outputs on a USB stick, which he then gave to the defendant. “There were definitely photos on the USB stick, but now I don’t know if they were put into a text file,” he added that these photos were of very poor quality. “I don’t know if it came from the text or from Mr. Kriak’s oral presentation, but his findings should have indicated that during the weekend Ján Kuciak worked manually on the reconstruction of the house in Veľká Mač,” he clarified.
According to the witness, the assignment from Marian Kočner concerned a total of up to 20 people. In addition to several journalists, Jaromír Čižnár, the Prosecutor General of the Slovak Republic at the time, however, according to Tóth, his tracking was only “fake”. The team also followed the then president of the Regional Court in Bratislava, but with zero results. “The defendant also filed a request to monitor the then lawyer and politician Daniel Lipšic. The team executed it,” pointed out Tóth. As he continued, Kriak also caught the director of the security section of the Slovak Information Service at the time, Boris Beňa, who met with Marek Gašparec.
“One time Kriak and I just accidentally took a photo of Dušan Kováčik. I don’t remember if it was passed on to Marian Kočner,” added the witness. According to Tóth, the defendant also ordered the surveillance of Richard Sulík. “I gave the results of the surveillance to Marian Kočner,” he specified. It follows from the testimony of the witness that the results of the monitoring were to serve as the basis for the project Na pranieri.
“Kočner constantly hypnotizes me with his look,” said Tóth during the main hearing, adding that it disturbs him quite a bit. According to him, Kočner also made grimaces at him. The defendant responded that he was just looking at the witness. “Keep a stone face,” he was challenged by the chairman of the senate, Miroslav Mazúch. However, according to his words, the defendant has the right to look at the witness during his interrogation.
Tóth is testifying for the third day in a row. On Monday (June 22) and Tuesday (June 23), he was interrogated for approximately eight hours. Among other things, he described the moments when he became suspicious of the defendants Marian Kočner and Alena Zsuzsová regarding the order for Kuciak’s murder.
