ON APRIL 29, Slovakia commemorated 10 years since a car driven by former policeman Róbert Remiáš blew up in Bratislava, killing its lone occupant. The Slovak Information Service (SIS), which was then led by Ivan Lexa, is suspected of having ordered the murder. The crime remains unsolved to this day.
At the time of his murder, Remiáš was a go-between for Oskar Fegyveres, a witness in the kidnapping of the son of Slovakia's former president, Michal Kováč. Kováč Jr was abducted to Austria in 1995.
The chairman of the Movement for a Democratic Slovakia (HZDS), Vladimír Mečiar, Slovakia's acting president in 1998, issued an amnesty on the kidnapping case, effectively blocking the prosecution of the culprits.
Police accused Lexa in 2002 of having ordered the Remiáš murder from Miroslav Sýkora, the former underworld boss of Bratislava who was gunned down in 1998.
Direct testimony is lacking, however. Most of the people who were involved in the case, and who claimed that Sýkora had boasted of his SIS contract to kill Remiáš, are now dead.
The SIS allegedly followed and wiretapped Remiáš until his murder.
The HZDS recently restated its traditional position that there is no proof that Remiáš was murdered at all. The party has in the past said he was killed by a spontaneous explosion, even though police experts identified traces of explosive in the remains of the car.
"I don't live anymore. I am merely forced to live and I cannot even name the feeling that I experience every day, every hour, every minute. It's a craving for justice, and a hopelessness and an enormous pain at the same time," Anna Remiášová, the mother of the murdered man, said in the past.
- Martina Jurinová
