Slovakia’s Supreme Court (NS SR) has overruled the 2023 acquittal of convicted fraudster Marian Kočner, the main suspect in the 2018 murder of investigative journalist Ján Kuciak and his fiancée Martina Kušnírová.

Kuciak’s murder rocked the country and sparked the largest mass demonstrations in the history of independent Slovakia, leading to the fall of the previous cabinet of populist Prime Minister Robert Fico, whose Smer party-led rule was seen as fostering a kleptocratic environment and mafia links, which enabled the cold-blooded murder.

“At a Tuesday [May 21] closed-door session, the Supreme Court cancelled the sentence of the Special Criminal Court in the matter of the accused Marian Kočner et al. and returned the case for the reason of mistakes in the challenged ruling,” NS SR spokesperson Alexandra Važanová said in a statement shared with state broadcaster STVR, daily SME and other Slovak media.

In the press release, NS SR listed the uncertainties of the findings, not attending to all the needed evidence, and not dealing with all the circumstances significant for the ruling among the mistakes. However, the full ruling is not yet released. 

It is the second time in the case of Kuciak's murder that the NS SK cancelled the acquittal of Kočner, who had previously been acquitted in 2020, but NS SK ordered the case to be reopened in 2021. In the May 2023 acquittal, Kočner’s girlfriend, Alena Zsuzsova, was handed a guilty verdict carrying a 25-year prison sentence for her role in plotting the murder. 

Važanová also said that the case was handed over to a different senate of the Special Criminal Court “for the reasons of not obeying the mandatory instruction of the NS SK”. This will result in new judges attending to the case. 

"From this brief information [about the May 20 overruling] we can suppose that judges of the NS SR probably do not want to acquit Marian Kočner of plotting the murder and very likely do not want to acquit Alena Zsuzsova either," investigative journalist Monika Tódová wrote in her commentary for DennikN.

Tódová also wrote that the NS SR ruling is "good news for the public and mainly for the relatives of Ján Kuciak and Martina Kušnírová”, but also criticised the country's judiciary for the lengthy trial. 

As bne IntelliNews reported, the May 2023 acquittal was hugely disappointing to the victims’ families and the journalistic community in Slovakia. The parents of Kuciak and Kušnirova left the courtroom in tears following Kočner’s acquittal in 2023. “There’s no logic in it,” the journalist’s father, Jozef Kuciak, told reporters, AP reported. “I don’t get it at all.”

In the 2023 ruling, Zsuzsova was also found guilty of plotting to murder state prosecutors Maroš Žilinka and Peter Sufliarský.

Both Kočner and Zsuzsova are already serving long sentences for other offences, for which they were convicted after the collapse of the system of legal protection they had built up of bribed politicians, judges, prosecutors and policemen. Kočner is serving 19 years in the TV Markiza fraud case, where he forged a promissory note for €69mn. Zsuzsova is serving 21 years for ordering the murder of Hurbanov mayor László Basternák.