Police raid makers of false forints
Police in this south-central Slovak town of 25,000 on September 11 uncovered a ring of forint forgers.
It happened more by accident, though, as officers discovered the cache in the trunk of a Škoda that they pulled over for a random inspection. Nestled in the trunk were false bank notes worth 20 million forints, police said.
The driver, a 38-year-old man whom police would not name, was an employee of an entrepreneur from Rimavská Sobota who was riding in the car along with him. Officers then obtained a warrant to search the entrepreneur's house, where they found a fake treasure - a set of 1,178 bank notes, each in 5,000 forint denominations - worth a total of 5.9 million forints.
The search is still on for two men who fled the house when officers arrived, and are thought to be accomplices in the scam. The house raid also turned up three machine guns and two hand guns. The Ministry of Defense released a statement on September 12, that detectives also discovered printing equipment, which was used to print the fake bills.
Nine people die in highway crash
A high-speed car accident on September 15 in broad daylight on the highway between this central Slovak town of 85,000 and Kremnička killed everyone in the two cars, police reported. Around two o'clock p.m., a 23-year-old unnamed woman from Bardejov smashed her BMW into an Opel driven by a 31-year-old unidentified German citizen. Riding in the BMW were the driver's 13-year-old brother and two of her friends.
Accompanying the German man were his Slovak friends from Banské, and two children aged 12 and 14 years.
The nine people were dead on the scene, police reported. "You could have copied the reports on their deaths, because the cause for all of them was identical," said Karol Dókuš, a pathologist at Roosevelt Hospital in Banská Bystrica. "The impact from the cars' collision inflicted terrible damage on their bodies."
Five boys sentenced for killing homeless man
A district court in this central Slovak city of 44,000 on September 16 sentenced six boys aged between 15-and-16 years to prison terms ranging from 1.5-2 years for killing a homeless man last winter.
On January 2, the group of boys asked a homeless man for a cigarette. He answered that he didn't have one, but later lit one in front of them.
Infuriated, the boys went back to their homes and grabbed baseball bats and chains, and set out in search of the man. Blind with rage, the group, now swelled to the six 15-16 year-old boys plus a group of five 12 year-olds, started beating a 44-year-old homeless man, failing to notice that he was the same one who angered them in the first place.
In less than twenty minutes, the man lay dead. The judge sentenced one boy who initiated the beating to 2 years, and handed out 1.5 year terms to two others. The younger boys [HOW YOUNG MUST YOU BE NOT TO BE SENTENCED? WERE THEY THE 15 YEAR OLD ONES? ALSO, IS IT THAT THEY CANT BE TRIED AS ADULTS BUT ONLY AS JUNIORS?] couldn't have been sentenced because of their age, but the court has delayed the process with them.
Compiled by Andrea Lörinczová and Daniel Borský from press reports
