He wrote dark, erotic verse and poems with themes of torture and pain. He has also self-published a book condemning the Roma people and questioning why Slovakia has not produced a homegrown version of Norwegian terrorist Anders Behring Breivik.
“Where is Breivik in Slovakia? Was he not born yet? What if he was?” he asks in the book. “I didn’t shoot anyone.” I told myself—I’m going to write a book.
The 71-year-old former coal miner, one-time stonemason and lifelong malcontent was charged on Wednesday with shooting Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico at close range.
When news broke that an unidentified man had shot and killed Fico in central Slovakia, it became clear that retired coal miner Milan Maruniak must be responsible.
“I’m 99 percent sure it was him. It couldn’t have been anyone else,” said Mr. Marugnak, a long-time associate of the man who has been charged with “premeditated attempted murder” but remains unnamed by authorities.
Wednesday’s shooting was the worst attack on a European leader in decades and shocked Europe.
But to some who know him, the fact that a man who lives in this provincial town has been arrested comes as no surprise. “He was always so weird and angry,” Mr. Marugnak said. “It’s just a matter of time before something happens.”
Slovak prosecutors have blocked information related to the case and barred police from revealing the names of the men accused. But the prosecutor’s office said it “would not be wrong” to identify the man as Juraj C., a name widely reported by Slovak news media. It was unclear whether the suspect had a lawyer.
Officials described the shooter as a “lone wolf,” a mentally disturbed man acting only for himself — a description of the crime that fits those who knew Juraj C.
However, on Friday, police visited the apartment complex where he lived and captured video footage from security cameras. Ondrej Szabo, the complex’s director, said investigators wanted to know if anyone had been to the man’s apartment in the days before the attack. Mr Sabo said he never felt the man was in danger and he often walked hand in hand with his wife. The couple has two children.
Video and photos of the gunman released shortly after the attack showed Marunjak and other residents of the town of Levice saying they recognized the bearded man as Juraj C., a local Known for his bad temper and resentful attitude.
“I’m not surprised that he is this person,” said Maria Cibulova, a member of the Rainbow Literary Club, where Juraj C. is a member.
She doesn’t like his poetry very much. “I was a romantic person, always looking for beautiful things,” she said, “but he always wrote about ugly, negative things.” She recalled that when Yuraj C. met at the bimonthly club When he shared his work at the meeting, other members reacted with more shock than admiration. “It’s always so strange and negative,” Ms. Zibulova said of his work.
One poem, “The Hut,” reimagines the Slovak mountains as part of the female anatomy, while “The Face” features descriptions of torture and pain. Both poems are included in a self-published book reviewed by The New York Times.
Slovakia is deeply divided politically, divided between Fico’s supporters and opponents, with politicians on both sides seeing the gunman as a product of opposing camps. But people who know him say he has never taken a clear stance on either side, choosing instead to choose any reason that allowed him to express his anger.
Yet, according to those who know him, he has maintained one cause for decades: enduring hostility toward Slovakia’s Roma minority. Mr. Maruniak said it had been Juraj C.’s obsession since they worked together in the coal mines in the 1970s. The 2015 book “Gypsies and Roma,” written and self-published by Juraj C., contains an overtly racist poem directed at minorities: “On the body of civilization, the cancer of crime is growing.”
On other issues, however, he frequently changed his stance.
For example, in 2016, Juraj C. publicly supported Slovenski Branci, a paramilitary group known for its support for Russia. In a statement of support, he said he admired the group’s “ability to act without state approval.”
Two years later, however, he got into a heated argument with another member of the literary club, who posted a message on Facebook expressing unease about a torchlit march by Ukrainian radical nationalists. He denounced fellow writers who had worked in Russia more than two decades ago as Russian agents hired by the Kremlin to taint Ukraine.
As Juraj C. turns against his former beacon of Russia, especially in the wake of a full-scale Kremlin invasion in 2022, his pro-Ukrainian views have grown stronger. Must be extremely anti-Russian,” the club member said. His name is withheld because his family fears retaliation.
In 2019, Juraj C. stopped attending literary club meetings and appeared unusually distant when he met people he had known for years on the street.
“He was immersed in his own world and reality,” Marugnak recalled.
A series of often contradictory statements and relationships over the years have provided Slovak politicians with ample material to distort the defendants’ views. The fact that Levis’s literary club was called “Rainbow” has fueled suggestions that he was an LGBTQ activist, a role that could explain his hostility to Mr. Fico, a defender of traditional family values.
But Ms. Zibulova, who has been president of the literary club for many years, said the club has nothing to do with LGBTQ causes.
The first person to identify the suspect was Danny Kollar, a Slovak living in London who runs one of Slovakia’s most watched and reviled social media outlets.
Kolar, who spreads conspiracy theories, immediately linked the shooting to the opposition Progressive Slovakia party, claiming the gunman was a supporter of the party. Party leaders thought this was a lie.
Zibulova said that discussions of politics or religion were prohibited at literary club meetings, so she knew nothing about the man’s political views, except that “he was against everything.”
“There was something deep inside him that was against what he saw as the injustice that had been done to him in his life,” she said.
In a brief biography submitted to a writers’ group, Juraj C. said he was “identified as a rebel by state power” during the communist era and was fired from his job as a skilled coal mine worker in 1997. The town of Handlova is where Fico was shot to death on Wednesday.
According to his own account in the Literary Club Journal, in 1989 he became the leader of the Levitz Protest Committee, an offshoot of the national anti-communist organization led by Vaclav Harvey (who later became Czech president).
But Mr. Marugnak said that was not the case. Anti-communist activists, he said, kept Jurjaj C. at arm’s length, considering him too radical and unreliable.
“Nobody really liked him,” Mr. Marugnak said. “He was never part of the team. He was never happy with anything. He could never really be part of any group.
Juraj C.’s 2015 book now reads like a description of his own personal growth. The show tells the story of notorious Slovak murderer Jan Harman, who killed eight people in a 2010 shooting.
“They declared him crazy, but he wasn’t crazy, he just couldn’t bear the burden anymore,” Juraj C. writes. “He no longer needs to curse, he no longer needs to hate. He has worn himself to the edge of the unknown.
Sarasinkulova and Marek Janiga contributed reporting from Bratislava, Slovakia.
