Robert Fico’s attacker: A poet with past ties to an ultranationalist and pro-Russian group

Many unknowns hang over Juraj Cintula, the 71-year-old man who on Wednesday fired five bullets at Robert Fico, the prime minister of Slovakia, who remains hospitalized in a serious condition. A poet and member of a literary club, in the last decade Cintula was linked to an ultra-nationalist and pro-Russian paramilitary group; he also founded a platform against violence, wrote about his contempt for the Roma minority and, more recently, expressed his rejection of a government whose leader has often been described as a pro-Russian, populist who, critics worried, would change Slovakia’s pro-Western course. The attack comes shortly before European elections where the far right is widely expected to make gains.

Slovak authorities have not yet made public the name of the attacker, who was arrested immediately after the assassination attempt, but local media have identified him as Juraj Cintula and began to disseminate some details about his past. A native of Levice, a town 46 miles (75 kilometers) south of Handlová, the town where Wednesday’s attack took place, he was employed as a guard at a security company. Little else has emerged about his work life.

Since 2015 he has been 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 remarks against the Roma community in Slovakia.

Besides his 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 media. 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 ultranationalist and pro-Russian paramilitary group that dissolved in 2020. In a video published in 2016 on Facebook, Cintula is seen at an event organized by the extremist group that 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

After being arrested, Cintula — who faces a sentence of between 25 years and life in prison — justified shooting Fico by citing his disagreement with the government’s policies and denounced the prime minister’s “attacks” on public radio and television. The Slovak Interior Minister, Matus Sutaj Estok, on Thursday defined the attacker as a “lone wolf” and said 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 and the closure of the public radio and television station that Fico was planning.

The Slovak prime minister has paused 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 made “his decision” 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 said that his father had a gun license and that he had never heard him make any comments in which he expressed his intention to attack or kill anyone. “I don’t have the slightest idea what he intended to do, or what he was planning 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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