Slovak Prime Minister’s attacker Sintula taken into preventive detention

This Saturday a court ordered the remand of Juraj Syntula, arrested for shooting and seriously wounding Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico, into preventive detention, arguing the risk of escape and recidivism Was.

The investigating judge of the Special Criminal Court of the city of Pezinok has accepted the request of the prosecutor’s office, a decision against which Syntula can still file an appeal, a spokesman for that court said.

Scintula was taken to that court under tight security measures to testify for the first time since her attack.

The attacker, who shot Fico five times last Wednesday, has been charged by police with attempted first-degree murder and faces a sentence of 25 years to life in prison.

Syntula, who admitted his crime during police interrogation, has said that he shot the prime minister because he did not agree with his policies and wanted to hurt him, radio station TA3 reported, but that Denied that he wanted to kill them.

Fico remains hospitalized, stable and conscious, but in critical condition after two surgeries since Wednesday to treat four gunshot wounds.

The Prime Minister was shot on Wednesday as he was leaving a Council of Ministers meeting in the town of Handlova.

The profile of the attacker reflects many contradictions: a critic of Fico who opposed violence, but who had aligned himself with ultranationalist and racist narratives in the past.

Sintula comes from an area where there was high unemployment due to the closure of coal mines during previous Fico governments and he has taken part in several anti-government protests organized by the opposition since last December.

The political and social polarization that already existed in Slovakia before the Covid pandemic has worsened since Fico’s return to power last October at the head of a coalition of left-wing and far-right nationalists.

Fico’s measures such as abolishing the anti-corruption prosecutor’s office, which investigated members of his party; his plan to eliminate public radio and television, which he considers anti-patriotic; Or sanctions on NGOs, following the Russian model, have provoked mass civil protests encouraged by the progressive opposition.

The country’s outgoing President Zuzana Caputova and her replacement, President Robert Pellegrini, have called on leaders of parliamentary parties to meet next Tuesday “to calm the situation and reject violence.”