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Slovakia to extradite Italian suspect named by murdered journalist

Slovak prosecutors decided on Friday to extradite an Italian businessman wanted in Italy on drugs charges, who was also named by murdered journalist Jan Kuciak in an explosive report on alleged high-level corruption linked to the mafia.

Published: 4 May 2018 14:34 CEST
Slovakia to extradite Italian suspect named by murdered journalist
Police outside a house linked to Italian businessman Antonin Vadala in Slovakia. Photo: Roman Hanc/News Agency of the Slovak Republic (TASR)/AFP

Police arrested Antonino Vadala, the owner of several companies based in Slovakia, in March in connection with a European arrest warrant issued by Italy last year over alleged drug trafficking. Vadala also faces charges of attempted EU subsidy fraud in Slovakia. He has flatly denied the allegations, which were first made public in Kuciak's article.

The Italian had been detained and released earlier in March month over the alleged fraud.

“The Regional Prosecutor's Office of Kosice on Friday issued a decision to execute the European arrest warrant issued by a court in Venice against the Italian entrepreneur Antonin Vadala,” spokesman Milan Filicko said in a statement, using another name for Antonino Vadala.

“The legal deadline for the physical handover of the person to the competent Italian authorities is 10 days,” Filicko said, adding that Vadala had not appealed against the extradition.

READ ALSO: Murdered Slovak journalist was 'investigating Italian mafia'


Photo: Vladimir Simicek/AFP

Vadala's name was mentioned several times in Kuciak's last unfinished investigative report, which was published after the journalist and his fiancee were found shot dead at their home near Bratislava in late February.

The murders and the article sparked nationwide anti-government protests in the EU country of 5.4 million people, forcing the resignation in March of populist prime minister Robert Fico. Kuciak's article raised possible political links to Italian businessmen with alleged ties to Calabria's notorious 'Ndrangheta mafia, supposedly operating in eastern Slovakia.

The EU member's National Criminal Agency (NAKA) investigator began criminal proceeding against Valdala in April. He is alleged to have attempted to trick the Slovak Agriculture Paying Agency to pay out subsidies amounting to roughly €120,000 through one of his companies. He falsely declared liabilities connected with the conditions for the agricultural subsidies to be paid.

Organizers have called another anti-government protest for Friday to honour the memory of the murdered couple on the eve of their wedding that was supposed to take place on May 5th. 

READ ALSO: Press freedom in Italy: Key things to know


Photo: Andreas Solaro/AFP

CRIME

Amanda Knox reconvicted in Italy in slander case linked to 2007 murder

Amanda Knox was again found guilty of slander on Wednesday, in a retrial in Italy related to her infamous jailing and later acquittal for the 2007 murder of her British roommate.

Published: 5 June 2024 12:33 CEST
Amanda Knox reconvicted in Italy in slander case linked to 2007 murder

The American cried in court in Florence as she was sentenced to three years already served for having accused, during police questioning, an innocent bar owner of killing 21-year-old Meredith Kercher.

“I’m very sorry I was not strong enough to have resisted the police pressure,” Knox told the judges.

“I was scared, tricked and mistreated. I gave the testimony in a moment of existential crisis.”

She was 20 when she and her Italian then-boyfriend were arrested for the brutal killing of fellow student Kercher at the girls’ shared home in Perugia.

READ ALSO: ‘I hope to clear my name’: Amanda Knox back in Italy for slander retrial

The murder began a long legal saga where the pair was found guilty, acquitted, found guilty again and finally cleared of all charges in 2015.

But Knox still had a related conviction for slander, for blaming the murder on a local bar owner during initial questioning by police.

In October, Italy’s highest court threw out that conviction on appeal and ordered a retrial, which began earlier this year in Florence in Knox’s absence.

The night she was interrogated was “the worst night of my life… I was in shock, exhausted”, she said on Wednesday.

“The police interrogated me for hours and hours, in a language which I hardly knew, without an official translator or a lawyer”.

“I didn’t know who the killer was… They refused to believe me”, she said.

‘Something so horrible’

Kercher’s half-naked body was found in a pool of blood inside the roommates’ cottage in November 2007. Her throat had been slit and she had suffered multiple stab wounds.

During police questioning, Knox implicated Congolese bar owner Patrick Lumumba, who then spent almost two weeks behind bars before being released without charge.

Knox was convicted of slandering him in 2011 and sentenced to three years already served.

But she said she was yelled at and slapped during the police investigation – claims that prompted a separate charge of slandering police, of which she was cleared in 2016.

Amanda Knox arriving in court in Florence, on June 5th, 2024. (Photo by Tiziana FABI / AFP)

The police had found a message on Knox’s phone they said was proof she and Lumumba were plotting.

“They told me I had witnessed something so horrible that my mind had blocked it out,” Knox said on Wednesday. “One of the officers cuffed me round the head and said ‘remember, remember!’,” she said.

“In the end… I was forced to submit. I was too exhausted and confused to resist.”

The European Court of Human Rights in 2019 ruled that Knox had not been provided with adequate legal representation or a professional interpreter during her interrogation.

That ruling, which found her treatment “compromised the fairness of the proceedings as a whole”, was cited by Italy’s top court last year when it ordered the retrial.

‘Monster of Perugia’

Knox said last October that at the time of Kercher’s murder, Lumumba “was my friend”.

But Lumumba’s lawyer, Carlo Pacelli, described how Knox’s accusation changed his life.

“When he was accused by Amanda he became universally considered the monster of Perugia,” he told reporters outside court.

Knox was hugged by her husband in court – the same one where she was reconvicted of murder in 2014 – as reporters looked on.

Her murder trial attracted global interest, much of it salacious, focusing on prosecutors’ claims that Kercher died as part of a sex game gone wrong.

But Italy’s highest court, when it acquitted Knox and former boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito once and for all, said there had been “major flaws” in the police investigation.

One person remains convicted of Kercher’s murder — Ivorian Rudy Guede, who was linked to the scene by DNA evidence.

He was sentenced in 2008 to 30 years for murder and sexual assault, his sentence later reduced on appeal to 16 years.

Guede was released early in November 2021.

Now 36 and with two young children, Knox is a journalist, author and campaigner for criminal justice reform.

She first returned to Italy five years ago to address a conference on wrongful convictions, appearing on a panel entitled “Trial By Media”.

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