Ján Kuciak

On 25th February 2018, the Slovak investigative journalist Jan Kuciak and his fiancee Martina Kusnirova are found shot dead in their small house. They are 27 years old. The investigations which follow the double homicide lead to a story of power and its abuse, to servility and sex, to a mafia-like network that committed murders and planned more. A system emerges which has been hollowed out and subverted by crime, privatised and instrumentalised by criminal groups whose tentacles reach far into the judiciary, the police and to the very top of politics. Jan Kuciak and Martina Kusnirova had to die because they lived in a mafia state.

Christoph Lehermayr, born in 1979, studied political science and Slavic studies in Vienna and Prague. He has been working as an investigative journalist at the research platform Addendum since 2019. Prior to that, he was the head of the international news department at the current affairs magazine News. He speaks Czech, reads and understands Slovak and is regarded as an expert on the countries of central and eastern Europe. Since the murder of the investigative journalist Jan Kuciak and his fiancee, he has devoted himself intensively to the case, carried out dozens of interviews, examined documents and followed the trial of the alleged perpetrators and initiators.