The life of the Slovak Prime Minister, Robert Ficois no longer in danger, his deputy prime minister assured this Sunday, Robert Kalinak, after the assassination attempt he suffered this week.
“We can consider his condition to be stable, with a positive prognosis,” Kalinak said outside the hospital.
The alleged shooter, identified by Slovak media as 71-year-old poet Juraj Cintula, was charged with attempted premeditated murder and was remanded in custody on Saturday.
Kalinak said Fico had suffered four gunshot wounds, one of them serious.
Interior Minister Matus Sutaj Estok said that if one of the shots “had reached a few centimeters higher, it would have hit the prime minister’s liver.”
Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico is led by security personnel to a vehicle after a man shoots him.
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He achieved this new mandate after campaigning on peace proposals between Russia and Ukraine, Slovakia’s neighbor, and after promising to stop sending military aid to kyiv, which he did after being elected.
The assassination attempt caused great shock in the country of 5.4 million inhabitants, a member of the EU and NATO, which has been experiencing a strong political division for years.
Preventive detention for the aggressor
The investigating judge of the Specialized Criminal Court of the town of Pezinok has accepted the request of the Prosecutor’s Office, a decision against which Cintula can still file an appeal, reported a spokeswoman for that court.
A suspect was arrested just after the attack.
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The attacker, who shot Fico five times last Wednesday, was charged by the Police with attempted first-degree murder and faces the possibility of a sentence of between 25 years and life in prison.
Cintula, who admitted his guilt in a police interrogation, as reported by radio station TA3, has stated that he shot the prime minister because he did not agree with his policies and wanted to hurt him, but has denied that he wanted to kill him.
The prime minister was shot on Wednesday as he left a Council of Ministers meeting in the town of Handlová.
Cintula comes from a region with high unemployment due to the closure of coal mines during previous Fico governments and participated in several anti-government protests organized by the opposition since last December.
The political and social polarization already existing in Slovakia before the covid pandemic has increased since the return to power, last October, of Fico at the head of a coalition of left-wing and far-right nationalists.
Fico’s measures such as the abolition of the anti-corruption Prosecutor’s Office, which investigated members of his party; his plan to eliminate public radio and television, which he considers unpatriotic; or the restrictions on NGOs, following the Russian model, have provoked massive citizen protests encouraged by the progressive opposition.
The country’s outgoing president, Zuzana Caputova, and her replacement, president-elect Robert Pellegrini, have called on the leaders of the parliamentary parties to meet next Tuesday. “to calm the situation and reject violence.”
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