STS: Judge Grants Marian K.'s Request to Postpone His Questioning until March

Pezinok, 13 February (TASR) - The planned questioning of Marian K. [name abbreviated due to legal reasons], the alleged mastermind behind the murder of investigative journalist Jan Kuciak and his fiancée Martina Kusnirova, will not take place during the main hearing at the Specialised Criminal Court in Pezinok on Friday, as presiding judge Miroslav Mazuch granted the defendant's request for postponement until the next main hearing in March, TASR reported on the same day. Marian K. expects that his statement will take some 35 minutes during his testimony, which will also require a technician, screen and computer, as he intends to speak about communications from the Threema application, as well as to comment on the Supreme Court's ruling. Marian K.'s lawyer Marek Para said that during the defendant's testimony, only parts of encrypted communications will be read out. "In this way we will respond to the latest ruling by the Supreme Court. We agree with the prosecutor's approach to subsequently present Threema as evidence from A to Z," he noted. Marian K. said he requested the postponement in order to be able to the testify continuously. After his request was granted, he was allowed to leave the courtroom. At Friday's main hearing, the statement of Alena Zs. from the previous proceedings is to be presented, while defendant Dusan K. announced that he would refuse to testify at this stage and plans to undergo questioning at a later time. In the case of the murder of Kuciak in February 2018, during which Kuciak's fiancée Martina Kusnirova was also killed, Marian K. and Alena Zs. are facing charges for ordering the killings. The previous two verdicts were overturned by the Supreme Court. The case has thus been referred to the Supreme Court for the third time. The perpetrators of the murder, Miroslav Marcek and Tomas Szabo, have already been sentenced to 25 years' imprisonment, while Zoltan Andrusko has been sentenced to 15 years. In addition to Marian K. and Alena Zs., Dusan K. and Darko D. are also facing charges for plotting the murders of prosecutors. According to the indictment, the orders to kill Zilinka and Lipsic allegedly came in the autumn of 2017. In the case of Peter Sufliarsky, the order was allegedly made in 2018. jrg