Many unknowns hang over Juraj Cintula, the 71-year-old man who this Wednesday fired five bullets at Robert Fico, the prime minister of Slovakia, who remains hospitalized in serious condition. Poet and member of a literary club, in the last decade Cintula was linked to an ultra-nationalist and pro-Russian paramilitary group, founded a platform against violence, wrote about his contempt for the Gypsy minority and, recently, expressed his rejection of the Fico Government.
The Slovak authorities have not yet made public the name of the attacker, who was arrested immediately after the attack, but local media identified him as Juraj Cintula and began to disseminate some details about his past. A native of Levice, a town 75 kilometers south of Handlová, the town where Wednesday’s attack took place, he was employed as a sworn guard at a security company. Little else has emerged about his work life.
Since 2015 he was a member of the Association of Slovak Writers. In Levice, where he lived in a modest apartment in a seven-story building, he was one of the founders of the Dúha (Rainbow) Literary Club. One of the 23 members of the club, Andrej Hlinka, was a candidate for the Slovak People’s Party, a far-right party, in the 2022 regional elections. Cintula published three books of poetry in recent years, one of them riddled with insults to the community gypsy from Slovakia.
Beyond literary inclinations, in 2016, the perpetrator of the attack founded a political platform called Movement Against Violence. “The world is full of violence and weapons, as if people had gone crazy,” he declared in a video posted on social networks. Cintula urged citizens to “take to the streets again, fill the squares, show strength but not violence” and asserted that Slovak democracy was threatened by “the oligarchs and rich people who buy political representatives.”
While leading the Movement Against Violence, Cintula maintained ties with Slovenskí Branci, an ultra-nationalist and pro-Russian paramilitary group that dissolved in 2020. In a video published in 2016 on Facebook, Cintula is seen at an event of the extremist group, in which he advocated for the creation of armed militias to protect Europeans from the arrival of “hundreds of thousands of migrants.” Slovenskí Branci acted for years as a Kremlin propaganda tool, criticizing NATO and the EU for allegedly threatening Russian interests.
Anti-government protests
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After being arrested, Cintula, who faces a sentence of between 25 years and life in prison, justified his attack on Fico by not agreeing with the Government’s policies and denounced his “attacks” on public radio and television. The Slovak Interior Minister, Matus Sutaj Estok, this Thursday defined the attacker as a “lone wolf” and assured that he had recently participated in several anti-government protests. The perpetrator of the attack was “very involved in political events” and the reasons for the attack were, supposedly, his disagreement with the cessation of military aid to Ukraine, the abolition of the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office or the closure of the public radio and television station that Fico was planning. , according to Sutaj Estok. The Slovak Prime Minister has interrupted the military aid that Slovakia was giving to Ukraine and has defended a ceasefire with Russia, even at the cost of kyiv accepting territorial losses. Sutaj Estok also stressed that the attacker took “his decision from him” last April, after the second round of the presidential elections in which Peter Pellegrini, an ally of Fico, was the winner.
In a statement to the Slovak digital media Aktuality.sk, Cintula’s son assured that his father had a weapons license and that he never heard any comments in which he expressed his intention to attack or kill anyone. “I don’t have the slightest idea what he intended, or what he planned or what happened,” he added, before adding that his father does not have any type of psychiatric problem. Mile Ludovit, a retiree who has been a resident of Cintula for many years, told Reuters: “He was an educated man who did not seem particularly interested in political issues, but he felt that some of the government’s measures were not appropriate.”
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