Vietnamese businessman and former Communist Party member Trinh Xuan Thanh stands during a court hearing in Hanoi, Vietnam, on January 24, 2018. (source: TASR/AP)
The police may start to investigate Slovakia’s role in the abduction of a Vietnamese citizen from scratch, five years after the crime happened.
Unlike the Slovak authorities, Germany understands the case as a fait accompli.
“There’s no evidence that he [the Vietnamese citizen] was taken through the Czech Republic to Slovakia,” claimed Slovak General Prosecutor Maroš Žilinka in March 2021. In parliament he presented the findings of the investigation into the 2017 case.
It was also the first time the general prosecutor refused to respond to media questions, while lawmakers criticised him for a lack of answers regarding the abduction scandal.
In November 2022, the second person involved in the abduction, Le Anh Tu, appeared in German court. Accompanied by other men, he is alleged to have abducted Vietnamese businessman Trinh Xuan Thanh in Berlin’s Tiergarten Park and taken him abroad.
In Slovakia, the abduction case itself has been handled by the Interior Ministry’s Inspectorate, not the police. The Bratislava Regional Prosecution Office has overseen the investigation.
More recently, at the end of November, the National Crime Agency initiated a prosecution due to suspicion of corruption linked to the abduction case. This investigation is overseen by the Special Prosecutor’s Office, raising the question of whether two separate investigations may lead to the same findings.
Special Prosecutor Daniel Lipšic has met with the representatives from the General Prosecutor’s Office to discuss a coordinated approach to the two investigations.
“They said they would assist us,” Lipšic told the Denník N daily.
If the crime agency wants to investigate the abduction case, it would need approval from regional prosecutor Soňa Juríčková. No decision has been made yet.
Nonsense versus international embarrassment
The police, the general prosecutor, and even Lipšic have declined to comment on the abduction case and its investigation. The prosecution regarding corruption was announced by police chief Štefan Hamran, but he failed to disclose more information.
Hence, it is not clear if former interior minister Robert Kaliňák of the Smer party is a suspect in the case. Despite information reported on by the media, Kaliňák himself denies any involvement in assisting the abduction of the Vietnamese entrepreneur.
“Mr. Hamran has always come up with nonsense, and this is one of his biggest stupidities,” Kaliňák said.
In the beginning, the Interior Ministry’s Inspectorate split its investigation of the abduction scandal into two different cases: the abduction itself and suspicions that Slovak politicians and police officers could have been involved. Nevertheless, it did not deal with the latter, explaining that the suspicions were not confirmed in any way.
Today, the police chief claims that he needs to know more information about this latter part of the investigation, not concealing the police’s willingness to look into the abduction case itself.
“I take it very seriously, ” he said, uttering that he sees the case as an international embarrassment for Slovakia.
Germans have no doubts
When Kaliňák resigned four years ago, his party colleague and ministerial successor, Denisa Saková, said that the scandal does not concern Slovakia. It was in 2018 that the Slovak media first reported on the case.
Saková was wrong. The German verdict that sentenced the first kidnapper, Hai Long N, to four years in prison paints a different picture. Thanh’s lawyer, Petra Schlagenhauf, does not understand why Slovakia has been distancing itself from the incident.
“The fact that my client was abducted to Vietnam through Bratislava and Moscow with the use of a Slovak government plane is mentioned in the first verdict against Hai Long N,” the lawyer said.
This verdict was upheld by the German Federal Court of Justice, she added.
For now, the German authorities do not know whether Slovakia knowingly helped Vietnam abduct the entrepreneur or if the country was deceived.
The indictment of the alleged driver, Le Anh Tu, claims that the abduction route ended in Brno at first. The kidnappers and Thanh spent the night. Then they headed to Bratislava, where the plane flew Thanh beyond the EU’s borders.
When the abduction took place in the Slovak capital, Kaliňák held a last-minute meeting with the Vietnamese delegation led by Public Security Minister To Lam at Hotel Bôrik, a Slovak government-owned facility.
Subsequently, Slovakia lent its government plane to the delegation to fly to Moscow. In order to obtain permission to fly over Polish territory, Slovakia first had to deceive its neighbour. Slovakia claimed that Kaliňák was onboard, which was not true.
A German investigator told the court in Berlin that the meeting with Kaliňák had been plotted on purpose with the aim of abducting Thanh.
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