[ad_1]
Former Slovak national police chief Milan Lucansky, who attempted suicide in custody on Tuesday, died on Wednesday, the Slovak civil service news agency TASR reported, citing the family of the deceased and the Ministry of Justice.
According to a report cited by the Slovak news agency MTI, Milan Lucansky tried to commit suicide on Tuesday in pre-trial detention in Presov and died in a local hospital on Wednesday afternoon. So far no official information has been released about the exact circumstances of the senior police officer’s death.
The former chief of the National Police was one of those detained by the Slovak National Law Enforcement Agency (NAKA) during its raids in November and December, which caused serious repercussions. The police operation, organized under several different pseudonyms, mainly detained senior police, intelligence and other officials, as well as economic actors considered influential.
Those involved were mostly prosecuted for corruption, money laundering, abuse of power or support for criminal activities. The series of arrest revenues has been harshly criticized by the strongest members of the current Slovak parliamentary opposition, politicians from the previous government, who claim that Slovak Prime Minister Igor Matovic is using the proceeds from police arrests for political struggle.
Igor Matovic and his allies won an anti-corruption program in parliamentary elections earlier this year, after a Fico / SMER era since 2006, with a two-year hiatus between 2010 and 2012. The political turn that allowed them to win was primarily triggered for the murder of investigative journalist Jan Kuciak, and the intricate threads of Kuciak’s murder led to an earlier Gorilla scandal that involved even the highest circles of Slovak politics. The massive corruption case, which started in 2005-2006 and erupted in 2011, involved key economic actors and organized crime of party leaders through the secret services, the police and has an impact on the social life of Slovakia to this day.
According to Matovic and his supporters, the Fico governments have never really investigated the Gorilla case in a really deep and comprehensive way, so the new government has called for more investigations. This series of measures has also led to the arrest of Jaroslav Haščák (one of the leaders of the Penta Group, who plays a central role in the Gorilla case) and the former head of the Slovak National Police Milan Lucansky, as Ficó refers to when talking about “politically motivated” measures.
The police chief continued to be denounced for three weeks because he had to be transferred to hospital from investigative captivity with a serious head injury sustained under unclear circumstances. The specific causes of this prior head injury to a senior police officer have not been clarified to date, and authorities have ruled out the possibility that the trauma was the result of outside intervention.
Due to the suicide attempt and death, the Slovak opposition harshly criticized Igor Matovic and his government. Milan Ivan, head of the Slovak Penitentiary Directorate (ZVJS), resigned on Wednesday because of what happened. And the strongest opposition party in the Slovak parliament, the Directional Social Democracy (Smer-SD), led by Robert Fico, had the prospect of convening an extraordinary session of parliament and removing the People’s nominated Minister of Justice Maria Kolíková Liberal (Za ludí). The latter was justified by former Interior Minister Robert Kalinák on the grounds that the former police chief had been detained despite denouncing, according to the Ficos, “subjected to psychological terror” and so far no witnesses or other suspects.
[ad_2]
