He wrote dark, erotic verse and poems featuring torture and pain. He also self-published a book that railed against Roma people and asked why Slovakia had not produced a homegrown version of Anders Behring Breivik, the Norwegian terrorist.
“Where is the Slovak Breivik? Has he not been born yet? And what if he has been?” he asked in the book. “I didn’t shoot anyone. I told myself — I’ll write a book.”
Then on Wednesday, the 71-year-old former coal mine worker, onetime stone mason and lifelong malcontent was charged with opening fire at point-blank range on Prime Minister Robert Fico of Slovakia.
As soon as news broke that an unidentified man had shot Mr. Fico in central Slovakia, it was obvious to Milan Maruniak, a retired coal miner, who must be responsible.
“I was 99 percent sure it was him. It couldn’t be anybody else,” said Mr. Maruniak, a longtime colleague of the man who has been charged with “attempted premeditated murder” but still has not been named by the authorities.
Wednesday’s shooting, the worst attack on a European leader in decades, sent shock waves across Europe.
But the fact that the man who had lived in this provincial town was arrested came as no real surprise to some who knew him. “He was always so weird and angry,” Mr. Maruniak said. “It was only a matter of time before something happened.”
Slovakia’s prosecutor has placed an embargo on information relating to the case, and banned the police from disclosing the name of the man who has been charged. But the prosecutor’s office said “it would not be wrong” to identify the man as Juraj C., the name widely reported by the Slovakian news media. It is not clear if the suspect has a lawyer.
Officials say the shooter was a “lone wolf,” an unhinged individual acting only for himself — an account of the crime that fits the profile sketched by people who knew Juraj C.
On Friday, however, police officers visited the apartment block where he lived and took video footage from security cameras. Ondrej Szabo, the supervisor for the complex, said that investigators wanted to see if anybody had visited the man’s apartment in the days leading up to the attack. Mr. Szabo said the man never struck him as dangerous and often went for walks hand in hand with his wife. The couple have two children.
Video footage and photographs of the shooter released soon after the attack showed a bearded man whom Mr. Maruniak and other residents of the town, Levice, said they recognized as Juraj C., a local known for his cranky behavior and resentful attitude.
“I was not surprised it was him,” said Maria Cibulova, a member of Rainbow, an area literary club, to which Juraj C. also belonged.
She didn’t like his poetry much. “I’m a romantic and always looking for nice things,” she said, “but he was always writing about ugly, negative things.” When Juraj C. shared his work at bimonthly club meetings, she recalled, other members reacted with more alarm than admiration. “It was always so strange and negative,” Ms. Cibulova said of his work.
One poem, “The Hut,” featured the mountains of Slovakia recast as parts of the female anatomy, while “The Face” was dominated by descriptions of torture and pain. Both poems were included in a self-published book that was seen by The New York Times.
Politicians on both sides of a deep political divide in Slovakia that is split between supporters and foes of Mr. Fico have presented the shooter as a product of the opposing camp. But people who know him say he never sided clearly with either, but jumped on any cause that allowed him to express his anger.
Yet there is one cause, according to people who know him, that he has stuck with for decades: an abiding hostility toward Slovakia’s minority Roma population. Mr. Maruniak said that had been an obsession of Juraj C.’s since the 1970s, when they worked together at a coal mine. “Gypsies and Roma,” a book written and self-published by Juraj C. in 2015, included an openly racist poem about the minority: “On the body of civilization there is a tumor of criminality growing.”
On other matters, however, he regularly switched sides.
In 2016, for example, Juraj C. offered public support for Slovenski Branci, or Slovak Conscripts, a paramilitary group known for supporting Russia. In a statement of support, he said he admired the group’s “ability to act without approval from the state.”
Two years later, however, he began a bitter feud with another member of the literary club who had posted a message on Facebook expressing unease about torchlight parades in Ukraine by radical nationalists. He denounced his fellow writer, who had worked in Russia more than two decades before, as a Russian agent paid by the Kremlin to tarnish Ukraine.
Juraj C.’s pro-Ukrainian views became steadily stronger as he turned against Russia, his previous beacon, particularly after the Kremlin’s full-scale invasion in 2022. “He suddenly became extremely anti-Russian,” said the club member, who asked that his name not be published because his family feared retribution.
In 2019, Juraj C. stopped attending meetings of the literary club and seemed strangely detached when he ran into people he had known for years on the street.
“He was off in his own world and reality,” Mr. Maruniak recalled.
A trail of often-contradictory statements and affiliations over the years has given Slovakia’s politicians a wealth of material with which to spin the accused man’s views. The fact that the literary club in Levice is called Rainbow has fueled claims that he is an L.G.B.T.Q. activist, a role that would explain his hostility to Mr. Fico, a champion of traditional family values.
But Ms. Cibulova, who was president of the literary club for several years, said the club had no affiliation with L.G.B.T.Q. causes.
The first person to identify a suspect was Danny Kollar, a Slovak who lives in London, from where he runs one of Slovakia’s most widely followed and vituperative social media outlets.
Mr. Kollar, who traffics in conspiracy theories, immediately linked the shooting to Progressive Slovakia, an opposition party, claiming that the shooter was a party supporter. The party’s leader dismissed that as a lie.
Ms. Cibulova said it was forbidden to discuss politics or religion at meetings of the literary club, so she had no clear idea of the man’s politics, other than that “he was against everything.”
“He had something inside him against the injustice that he felt had been done to him in life,” she said.
In a brief personal biography Juraj C. submitted to the writers’ group, he said he had been “identified as a rebel by state power” in the Communist era, and had been fired from his job as a technical worker at a coal mine in nearby Handlova, the town where Mr. Fico was shot on Wednesday.
According to his own account in the literary club’s journal, in 1989 he became the leader of Levice’s protest council, a branch of a nationwide anti-Communist organization led by Vaclav Havel, who later became the Czech president.
But that, Mr. Maruniak said, is not true. He said Jurjaj C. was kept at arm’s length by activists in the anti-Communist movement, who saw him as too radical and unreliable.
“Nobody really liked him,” Mr. Maruniak said. “He was never part of the team. He was never content with anything. He could never really be part of any group.”
In his 2015 book, Juraj C. gave what now reads like an account of his own personal evolution. It came in a section about a notorious Slovak murderer, Jan Harman, who killed eight people in a shooting spree in 2010.
“They declared him insane, but he wasn’t insane, he just couldn’t carry the burden anymore,” Juraj C. wrote. “He doesn’t have to curse anymore, he doesn’t have to hate anymore. He’s worn his own down to that unknown edge.”
Sara Cincurova and Marek Janiga contributed reporting from Bratislava, Slovakia.
Source Agencies
