Artikelsammlung zum Thema "Kauza Cervanova" Slovak Spectator

Cervanová verdict written
Defendants can finally appeal after six months of waiting 11 Jun 2007 Ľuba Lesná Politics & Society
THE PRESIDENT of the Supreme Court Senate has produced a written verdict on one of Slovakia's most closely watched murder cases, five months after the original deadline.
The President of the Senate, Štefan Michálik, was originally required to produce a written verdict on the case of the murder of 19-year-old medical student Ľudmila Cervanová by January 5, within the one-month period after the judgement as demanded by Slovak law.The court claims that the written verdict is now ready."I can confirm that the verdict has now been written," court spokesperson Eva Rupcová told The Slovak Spectator.Since delivering the spoken verdict on December 4, 2006, Michálik has requested five times that Chief Justice of the Supreme Court Milan Karabín extend the deadline, arguing that the case is far too complex, since Cervanová was murdered almost thirty-one years ago on July 9, 1976.The written form of the verdict is crucial because its absence has prevented the Trnava District Court from acting. The senate of the Trnava court had to interrupt a sitting on the request of one of the convicts, Milan Andrášik, who had requested parole due to the lack of the written verdict."We will send the verdict this week along with the file to the Regional Court in Bratislava, which will deliver the document to whomever requests it," Rupcová said.The Supreme Court Senate toughened the sentences for Milan Andrášik and Miloš Kocúr, sentenced for the murder of the student, from 13 to 15 years in prison. They both already spent nine and half years in prison under the communist regime. They resumed their prison sentences last December 19.Andrášik's defense lawyer, Milan Kanás, refused to comment on the time it took the Supreme Court to produce the written verdict."I will be able to comment on it when we get the verdict and see what is in it," Kanás told The Slovak Spectator.Eva Andrášiková, Andrášik's sister, said she was very disappointed that Michálik needed six months to write the verdict."We just wanted the President of the Senate to carry out his legal duty and write the verdict within the time determined by law, which is one month," Andrášiková said. "He didn't do it. I'm a teacher and I have to write my school reports in time. Doesn't a judge have to respect the law? My brother is innocent and he was put in jail in December without any written document, only on an oral decision. This is like in some developing country. We call ourselves a democracy?"A lawyer who asked to remain anonymous told The Slovak Spectator that "it really seems that the judge did not know how to justify his decision".The convicted men have been waiting for the written verdict so that they can appeal it. They said they are convinced that the senate of the Supreme Court failed to decide the case legally. They are determined to turn to the Constitutional Court or to the European Court for Human Rights but they cannot do so without the written verdict.On December 4, 2006, the Supreme Court Senate found six men from Nitra guilty of a murder committed on July 9, 1976. The court refused to deal with evidence produced by the police during the early stages of the investigation in 1976, which were hidden until last year in police archives in Levoča. The police produced 8,000 pages of evidence during the first two years of the investigation.When delivering the sentence last year, Michálik discarded the complaints of their defence lawyers that they were tortured mentally and physically in the prison in order to make them confess."Pre-trial custody is not a holiday in a hotel room with free board," he said.He added that he was convinced they were guilty. He even noted: "It is a good thing for the accused that Slovakia no longer has the death penalty."Four of the convicts, who were not sent back to prison as they had already served their sentence in the 1980's, underwent a lie-detector test.US polygraph expert Patrick Coffey, who has trained Slovak Intelligence Service and National Security Office agents in the use of lie-detectors, tested the four men and said the test ruled out any chance these men were involved in the murder."For me as a professional, it is absolutely clear that they were not witnesses to any crime," he told the Týždeň weekly. The other two men, who were in prison, could not undergo the test, as they had been forbidden to do so by the director of prison in Leopoldov, where they are serving their sentence.
http://www.spectator.sk/articles/view/27890
http://spectator.sk/articles/view/26212/

Cervanová accused refused parole
Parole request denied by District Court 26 Mar 2007 Ľuba Lesná Politics & Society
František Čerman undergoes a lie-detector test - successfully - in February.
photo: Týždeň - Andrej Bán

ONE OF the men convicted in the 1976 murder of Ľudmila Cervanová will stay in jail, after the District Court in Trnava ruled it couldn't approve his parole request on March 20.
Milan Andrášik will stay in the Leopoldov prison. The district court adjourned the parole hearing until April 19.The president of the court senate said she had no basis on which to decide on Andrášik's release, as she did not have the written version of the verdict given by the Supreme Court in December 2006.On December 4, the Senate of the Supreme Court, under the presidency of Štefan Michálik, found six men from Nitra guilty and sentenced Andrášik to 15 years in prison.However, Michálik has not yet written the verdict. The spokesperson of the Supreme Court, Eva Rupcová, said the delay is due to the complexity of the whole case.Andrášik's lawyer, Martin Kanás, told The Slovak Spectator he is upset with the delay."I am very surprised that the president of the Senate did not manage to write the verdict even three months after the judgment was given. Even though he somehow managed to write the arrest warrant," he said."Immediately after the judgment was pronounced, Milan Andrášik was imprisoned, and now the extension of the deadline for completing the judgment constitutes an obstacle that prevents my client from being released."In the March 20 hearing, the judicial senate in Trnava dealt with a reference from the director of the correctional institution and detention institution in Leopoldov. It said Andrášik met only some of the conditions to be released on parole, and thus the director of the prison did not recommend it.According to him, Andrášik's behaviour was not at the level required in that phase of his imprisonment, as he harmed himself by embarking on a hunger strike. But the reference went on to say Andrášik is now stabilized and cooperative.Kanás told The Slovak Specatator he disagreed with the description. He said Andrášik kept the hunger strike for 35 days as a form of protest against the Supreme Court's verdict, which he considered unjust because he feels he is innocent."Maybe the only way to show a protest in prison is to keep the hunger strike," Kanás said. "Such a hunger strike cannot be mistaken for deliberate self-harm."And besides, Milan Andrášik lived an irreproachable life for the 16 years he was at liberty, from the time he was released by the Czechoslovak Supreme Court until the Slovak Supreme Court gave its verdict. What bigger rehabilitation can you show than this?"Andrášik was one of six Nitra residents convicted of raping and murdering Ľudmila Cervanová, a young medical student, on July 9, 1976. In September 1982, they were found guilty and each was sentenced to prison for between four and 24 years.In March 1990, the Czechoslovak Supreme Court revoked the verdict because of 72 errors found in the process and instructed the Regional Court in Bratislava to re-open the case and bring a verdict.The case languished in Slovak courts for 16 years until the defendants themselves requested the continuation of the trial.On December 4, the Slovak Supreme Court increased Andrášik's sentence from 13 years to 15. The court also increased the sentences of two other accessories to the Cervanová murder - Stanislav Dúbravický and Miloš Kocúr. It confirmed the 11-year sentences for František Čerman, Pavol Beďač and Juraj Lachman.By August, Andrášik will have served two-thirds of his sentence, which will allow him to ask for conditional release.Recently, Andrášik asked the director of Leopoldov prison for permission to take a lie detector test. The head of the Prison and Judicial Guard Force, Oto Lobodáš, refused, saying it would be impossible due to the "law on the sentence or any other generally obligatory legal rules".But Allan Böhm, the lawyer representing two of the other convicted men, told The Slovak Spectator that none of these legal rules prohibits such a test.Four other convicted Nitrans who are now free recently took the polygraph test. All four tests unambiguously showed that none of them had anything to do with Cervanová's murder.
http://www.spectator.sk/articles/view/27186

Still no written verdict after 5 months
Wait for official copy of Cervanová trial verdict drags on 21 May 2007 Ľuba Lesná Politics & Society
Milan Andrášik and Miloš Kocúr, were arrested in December immediately after the verdict was handed down.
photo: ČTK

THE SIX men convicted in December of murdering medical student Ľudmila Cervanová have still not received an official copy of the verdict.
The extreme delay is the result of a request by Štefan Michálik, the president of the senate of the Supreme Court, which ruled on the case, that Chief Justice Milan Karabín grant him a fifth thirty-day extension to the verdict's deadline.At the beginning of May, Karabín granted the request, despite a statement by his spokesperson to The Slovak Spectator in April that the judges had agreed the verdict would be completed by May 5, and that the chief justice was against postponing it further.Asked why Michálik had requested yet another extension, and why Karabín agreed, the chief justice's spokesperson, Eva Rupcová, had no answer."I cannot tell you why," she told The Slovak Spectator. "I don't know, and I won't comment on this anymore."Two of the convicted, Milan Andrášik and Miloš Kocúr, were arrested in December immediately after the verdict was handed down. Their parole cannot be decided without the written verdict, which they are legally entitled to.Allan Böhm, the attorney who represents those of the men who finished serving their sentence seventeen years ago, had no idea why it was taking so long to write the verdict."It seems that the judge does not know how to justify his decision," a lawyer, who prefers to remain anonymous, told The Slovak Spectator. "He passed the verdict and now he has to figure out what to write, as several lawyers, attorneys, and the media have called it unlawful."The written verdict is also needed for the convicted to file an appeal with Slovakia's Constitutional Court or the European Court of Human Rights.The verdict in this phase of the Cervanová case was decided on December 4, 2006, when the Senate of the Supreme Court found six men from Nitra guilty of the murder, which occurred on May 9, 1976. It has since been criticized for refusing to take into consideration evidence that had been compiled at the beginning of the investigation and left to collect dust in police archives in Levoča until last year.Three of the convicted men were originally given a longer sentence than when they were sentenced in 2004 by the Regional Court in Bratislava. Miloš Kocúr and Milan Andrášik got 15 years instead of the 13 they were originally sentenced to, and Stanislav Dúbravický got 12 instead of 10.After the fall of communism, the Supreme Federal Court released all of the convicts after an examination of their original trial found investigators and lower courts had made seventy procedural errors. The case was then returned to the lower courts for retrial.In all, it took 17 years for the case to be decided.
http://www.spectator.sk/articles/view/27693

Two Cervanová accused cannot take polygraph
19 Mar 2007 Ľuba Lesná Politics & Society
MILAN ANDRÁŠIK and Miloš Kocúr, who were imprisoned for the July 1976 murder of medical student Ľudmila Cervanová 30 years ago, will not be allowed to take a polygraph test in an attempt to prove their innocence.Both asked for this test after four other men who were convicted of the same murder but have since served their sentences took it.Andrášik and Kocúr are currently in the Leopoldov jail. On March 12, Oto Lobodáš, the general director of the Board of Prison Service, told the ČTK news wire, "Neither the law on serving one's sentence, nor any other obligatory legal provisions, permit a person serving their sentence to take a polygraph test."However, Allan Böhm, attorney for two of the other convicted men, does not agree."The law does not settle the problem of whether a convicted person can undergo a lie detector test," said Böhm. "It is definitely not forbidden by law. The director of the prison is fully authorized to decide whether he will allow a prisoner to undergo such a test or not."This is similar to when a prison director decides whether a prisoner can meet a psychologist or not. Or whether a prisoner can be allowed to take part in a funeral. A polygraph is a completely harmless thing and, to be honest, I see no reason why a prisoner should not be allowed to take part in such a thing."František Čerman, Pavol Beďač, Juraj Lachman and Stanislav Dúbravický, who were not re-imprisoned after the Supreme Court's ruling last December as they had already served their sentences, took the tests last month. All four of them were tested by American polygraph expert Patrick Coffey, who has trained Slovak police and investigators in the use of lie detectors, and received the same unambiguous result - that they had nothing to do with the murder.However, it seems that the courts will not be taking the test results into consideration."In my opinion, the results of a polygraph test are not evidence," said Milan Karabín, the President of the Supreme Court.Seven men from Nitra were convicted in the early 1980s of murdering Cervanová, the daughter of the lieutenant colonel of the Slovak Air Force.After the fall of communism, the Federal Supreme Court contested the verdicts of lower courts. It found 72 cases where the investigators and courts had breached the law so it returned the Cervanová case to the regional court for a re-trial.However, after the Czechoslovak federation split up, Slovak courts delayed the case for another 14 years. In December 2006 the Supreme Court finally declared a verdict almost identical to the one given by the communist courts but did not give it in writing.When asked by The Slovak Spectator last week why the written verdict had still not been delivered, President of the Senate of the Supreme Court Štefan Michálik refused to answer.Michálik has asked for the written verdict's deadline to be extended numerous times. Originally he asked for the deadline to be extended to February 22, then to March 5, and now he has asked for yet another extension."The President of the Senate has asked for another delay, this time until April 5," Eva Rupcová, spokesperson of the Supreme Court, told The Slovak Spectator on March 15. "He has stated that this case is very complex and that so far he has only managed to write half of the verdict."Without the written verdict, the convicted cannot appeal to the Constitutional Court, but they have said they are determined to do so as soon as the verdict has been announced.
http://www.spectator.sk/articles/view/27124

Polygraph absolves Cervanová accused
Results of testing by US polygraph expert provide only "moral victory" 5 Mar 2007 Ľuba Lesná Politics & Society
František Čerman, who spent seven years in jail for the rape and murder of medical student Ľudmila Cervanová, undergoes a lie detector test in early February that absolved him of guilt in the case. The other three accused who did the same test scored the same result, leaving a large question mark over the court verdict condemning them.
photo: Týždeň - Andrej Bán

LIE detector tests administered to four of the six men sentenced to jail in 1982 for the murder of medical student Ľudmila Cervanová have shown that none of them had anything to do with the crime.
The tests, administered in early February by US polygraph expert Patrick T. Coffey, produced negative results for Juraj Lachman, Pavol Beďač, František Čerman, and Stanislav Dúbravický.Three of the men have maintained since the 1976 rape and murder that they had nothing to do with the crime, while the fourth, Lachman, broke down under what he said was police pressure and confessed in the early 1980s, implicating the others.The other two men sentenced for the crime, Milan Andrašík and Miloš Kocúr, have said they want to take the test as well, but are unable to because they are still in jail serving 15-year sentences.Dúbravický described his feelings for The Slovak Spectator on hearing the results of the tests - 25 years after he was originally sentenced to 11 years in jail for the crime."It's an incredible feeling of satisfaction," he said. "It's not just about me or about proving my innocence. I'm just glad there are still people around who can look the truth in the face in this case. I was beginning to doubt they existed."
Polygraph expert Patrick T. Coffey examines the test results of one of the Cervanová accused.
photo: Týždeň - Andrej Bán

However, because the Slovak judicial system does not recognize the results of lie detector tests as evidence in court, even this latest grave doubt regarding the guilt of the Cervanová accused will likely be swept aside.
Štefan Michalík, the head of the Supreme Court panel of judges who upheld the men's sentences in December last year, hung up on February 27 when The Slovak Spectator attempted to reach him by telephone for comment.Meanwhile, Supreme Court Chief Justice Milan Karabín, who ordered key evidence in the case destroyed in 1988, preventing DNA tests from later deciding guilt, said that "in my opinion, the results of lie detector tests are not evidence".Eva Rupcová, the head of Karabín's office, told The Slovak Spectator that "this case was legally ended in the Supreme Court".During the quarter of a century since they were originally sentenced for the crime by the Bratislava Regional Court, the six men have tried to prove their innocence, and in 1990 even had their conviction overturned by the Czechoslovak Supreme Court, which identified 72 procedural and factual errors made by the lower court.But last year, the Supreme Court confirmed the original verdicts and even added time to three men's sentences, sending Andrašík and Kocúr back to prison.In commenting on the verdicts he had handed down, Justice Michalík said at the time that "it's lucky for the accused that Slovakia doesn't have the death penalty."Defence counsel Allan Böhm intends to file an appeal in the case to the Supreme Court, but is unable to because the court has still not provided him with an official written copy of its December 4, 2006 verdict.Until he receives the verdict, Böhm cannot appeal.Rupcová explained that Michalík had requested a second extension, this time to March 5, on the normal 30-day period the court is allowed for sending verdicts, because he said it was "a complicated case".DetectedAccording to the state's case, the accused abducted Cervanová from a student disco in Bratislava in 1976, raped her repeatedly, and later drowned her after she threatened to report them.Until 1981, police investigators interviewed people who had been at the disco that night, none of whom mentioned having seen any of the men who were later jailed for the crime. That initial evidence - 8,000 pages of it - was later hidden under mysterious circumstances in police archives in Levoča, and was only discovered by the defence in 2004. It was not admitted to the trial by the Supreme Court, however.The court also failed to take into account an autopsy report showing that the body of the victim bore no signs of having been raped, even though the police claim seven men had participated in the gang rape.Instead, the court rested its case on Lachman's original confession that he had brought the accused a clothesline to tie Cervanová up after she was kidnapped, and had witnessed the rape and murder. Andrašík and Kocúr confessed as well following their arrest, but all later said their confessions had been forced out of them by their communist interrogators.Lachman recently repeated for the Austrian TV station ORF that he had only "confessed" what the police had instructed him to. Coffey upheld Lachman's version of events following the lie detector tests."To pass a test you need six points," he said. "Mr. Lachman scored 18."Whereas in football it doesn't matter whether you kick the ball hard or slow, as the only thing that is important is if you score, here we could say that Mr. Lachman kicked the ball right out of the stadium with the force provided by truth."For me as a professional, it is absolutely clear that he was not a witness to any criminal act in this case."Böhm, who represents Beďač and Čerman in the case, said he regarded it as very important that Lachman had undergone the process voluntarily, given that his confession had provided the initial evidence to convict the others. "The lie detector test clearly proved that the evidence he gave the police regarding the other accused was untrue," he said.Böhm added that the lie detector evidence, even though inadmissible in court in Slovakia, was all the more important because it had been secured voluntarily from the accused, who had been willing to risk that the results might show them to be guilty.The testing was attended by reporters with the Týždeň weekly."In the US and in other countries, lie detectors are used during police investigations," Böhm said. "If suspects take the test and are shown to have nothing to do with the case, the police accept this result."Böhm said that in Slovakia various state organs, including the police, the secret service, and the National Security Bureau regularly use lie detector tests, although they don't carry the same weight as in the Czech Republic, for instance."They use them in accordance with the law, and in exactly the same way that Patrick Coffey used them on the accused in the Cervanová case. That's not surprising, given that Coffey has been teaching officials from all three institutions how to use this equipment since last year."Interior Ministry spokesman Viktor Plézel confirmed for The Slovak Spectator that hundreds of lie detector tests had been used by police investigators on witnesses, plaintiffs and defendants alike.Coffey has 30 years of experience with lie detector tests, and has tested over 14,000 people. From Slovakia he is scheduled to visit Iraq to train local security forces.Coffey, who performed the tests for free, asked his four test subjects a total of over 600 questions during three days of examination, starting at 09:00 and ending in the evening. On the first day the accused were asked general questions to find out if they had anything to do with the crime, on the second questions about the murder, and on the third about the rape.To ensure the results were judged objectively, Coffey performed the tests together with an official from the National Security Bureau. Independently of each other, the two men came to the same conclusions, which were confirmed by a computer.Lachman refused to comment on the test results for The Slovak Spectator, saying only that he was "ashamed" that his testimony had originally landed the other men in jail.Beďač said of the results: "Since the police dragged me into this case even though I wasn't guilty, I have had the feeling that I'm living someone else's life. The lie detector test results finally give me the hope that I can start living my own life again."According to Čerman, "the important thing here is that this is the only official confirmation of my innocence."Čerman also called the results "a moral victory".Defence attorney Böhm called the lie detector results "a bombshell", but said that the hidden evidence in the Levoča archives represented an even greater reason to believe the Cervanová accused innocent."That evidence showed that not one of the accused was at the disco the night Ľudmila Cervanová was kidnapped. But the courts never accepted it, so I won't be surprised if they take no notice of the lie detector results either."
http://www.spectator.sk/articles/view/26962

Andrášik hunger strike reaches month
Defense counsel hampered by fact court has not sent verdict 22 Jan 2007 Ľuba Lesná Politics & Society
Milan Andrášik has lost 12 kilograms in protest of his trial.
photo: ČTK
THE HUNGER strike of Milan Andrášik, one of the six men convicted of the 1976 murder of medical student Ľudmila Cervanová, reached a full month on January 19 despite pleas from his family to give up the protest.
"My mother and I are afraid for him," said Eva Andrášiková, Milan's sister, who has not yet been allowed by the prison authorities in Trenčín to visit him."He's 50 years old, and he's already lost 12 kilograms. He's risking his health."On December 4, after a court case lasting 24 years since the original sentences were handed down, Andrášik and four other men - Miloš Kocúr, František Čerman, Stanislav Dúbravický, and Pavol Beďač - had the verdicts confirmed by the Supreme Court. The court even added jail time to Andrášik and Kocúr, meaning they had to return to prison 16 years after having been freed by the Czechoslovak Supreme Court.The men maintain that they are innocent, and fault the court for continuing to ignore 8,000 pages of evidence that the police collected from 1976 to 1981, and that were later removed from the case file and buried in a police archives under mysterious circumstances. The counsel for the defense argues that the hidden evidence refutes the men's guilt.Andrášik's lawyer said his client had resorted to a hunger strike because he had no other way of protesting his innocence.
Lawyer Bohm says he would like to appeal, but is still waiting for the mailman.
photo: SITA

Lawyer Martin Kanás said that Andrášik was continuing to ingest liquids and vitamins, and that he would continue until his life was in danger. "He doesn't want to go to that final extreme," Kanás told The Slovak Spectator, "but he doesn't know how else to protest against an incarceration he believes to be illegal."
Eva Andrášiková corrected the lawyer's statement. "Milan started his hunger strike because the trial was illegal, not because his incarceration was illegal. He knew very well that the Supreme Court would jail him if it decided he was guilty. What he is protesting is the fact that the court violated his right to a free trial."In confirming the original sentences and adding new time, Supreme Court justice Štefan Michalík said he had no doubts of the guilt of the accused, or that the court was right in refusing to hear the buried evidence."The claim of the defence that the file was manipulated and that proof was buried is unfounded," he said in his closing statement on December 4. "The evidence that was secured was sufficient to ascertain what happened, and represent an unbroken whole."Bratislava region prosecutor Robert Vlachovský also judged the hidden files to be irrelevant to the case: "The guilt of the accused is proven by other evidence that is in the case file", he said.WaitingDespite their objections to Michalík's verdict, the lawyers for the accused can do nothing - not because they lack legal options, but because they are still waiting for a written copy of the court's decision to arrive in the mail, over six weeks after it was issued.According to Slovak law, appeals cannot be filed until formal court verdicts are received."I don't agree with the Supreme Court's verdict," said Allan Böhm, counsel for Čerman and Beďač, "but I'm still waiting for it to arrive before I can take any further steps. Without that decision I can do nothing."Böhm has promised to turn to the Constitutional Court on the basis that his clients did not receive a fair trial, and then to the European Court in Strasbourg if his appeal fails.Kanás added that he had filed a complaint against Andrášik's incarceration because he has tuberculosis, and that the complaint had been supported by a doctor's report. "Until this day, however, no one has responded to our complaint."New material unearthedThe murder of Cervanová aroused a strong response in Czechoslovakia at the time because of her youth and the brutality with which the police alleged it had been committed, including a gang rape and strangling.The case was also closely followed by the communist leadership, with breaking information being sent directly to President Gustáv Husák.Cervanová's father was Ľudovít Cervan, Czechoslovakia's military attaché to Syria and Saudi Arabia, and a member of the military intelligence service.Due partly to Cervan's profession, and partly to early witness reports, contained in the 8,000 pages hidden in the police archives, that Arab-looking men had taken Cervanová into their car on the night she was killed, the police originally investigated whether the killing had not been related to Cervan's activities on one of his postings. This theory was often refered to by the media as the Arab lead".The Slovak Spectator has discovered that the "Arab lead" was investigated by Czechoslovak military intelligence from 1976 to 1987. A source in Prague formerly with the military counter-intelligence service said that the documents related to the investigation were still in the Military Archives in Prague.Ladislav Bukovszky, the head of the archive section of the Nation's Memory Institute in Bratislava, told The Slovak Spectator that the Institute was due to receive all former military intelligence documents from the Czech Republic in the spring."In theory, we will be getting these materials. An agreement on how to split up the military counter-intelligence files has been completed."The Czech and Slovak defense ministers, Jiří Šedivý and František Kašický, recently confirmed the deal would be signed in the coming days. Bukovszky said the files would first go to the current Slovak military intelligence service, VOS, and then to the Nation's Memory Institute.
http://www.spectator.sk/articles/view/27890
http://www.spectator.sk/articles/view/26320/


Cervanová accused return to jail
Milan Andrášik's hunger strike reaches 15th day 8 Jan 2007 Ľuba Lesná Politics & Society
TWO OF the men found guilty by the Supreme Court on December 4 of raping and murdering medical student Ľudmila Cervanová in 1976, Miloš Kocúr and Milan Andrášik, have returned to jail 15 years after being released from a previous sentence for the same crime.The men voluntarily entered jail after hearing that the Supreme Court had issued an order for their arrest, Miloš Kocúr on December 18 and Milan Andrášik a day later.Since that time, Andrášik has been on a hunger strike, which he began, according to his lawyer Martin Kanás, after prison officials refused to take into account the statement of his doctor that Andrášik should not be jailed because of his health.Andrášik, who suffers from tuberculosis, was taken on January 4, the 15th day of his hunger strike, from his prison cell in Nitra to the Trenčín prison hospital in failing health."It's just awful, we have no news of him and can't get in touch with him," said Eva Andrášiková, the prisoner's sister, for The Slovak Spectator."Milan's life is already in danger after 15 days of fasting. He is just fighting for his basic human rights, as he is convinced he is innocent."I am really surprised that no one from a humanitarian organization, no member of parliament or anyone concerned with human rights has asked why my brother is on a hunger strike and risking his life."The men may be released after six months, because by that time they will have served the minimum two-thirds of their sentence - originally 13 years, as levied by the Bratislava District Court in 1982, but raised to 15 years last month.The lawyer for two of the accused, Bratislava attorney Allan Böhm, says he plans to petition the Constitutional Court on the basis of the fact that the Slovak court system has consistently ignored 8,000 pages of witness statements and other evidence the police secured from 1976 to 1981.The evidence, none of which suggests the involvement of the seven men originally jailed in 1982 for the crime, was separated from the main case file in the 1980s and hidden in a police archives in Levoča. It was not discovered by the defense until 2004, and it has never been heard in court.Depending on the verdict of the Constitutional Court, the accused may also petition the European Court for Human Rights.However, Böhm says he can do nothing until he receives a written copy of the decision of the Supreme Court.In its December 4 ruling, the court also increased the sentence of Stanislav Dúbravický from 10 to 12 years, and confirmed the sentences of František Čerman (11 years), Pavel Beďač (6 years) and Juraj Lachman (3 years).In March 1990, after the accused had already spent years in jail, Czechoslovak federal prosecutor Tibor Böhm appealed the original sentences, and was upheld by the Czechoslovak Supreme Court, which identified 72 procedural errors in the earlier court process, and returned the case for retrial.The case then languished for years at the Bratislava region court, during which time the accused were awarded Sk2.3 million because their right to a speedy trial was violated.Following the December Supreme Court verdict, Attorney General Dobroslav Trnka called the Cervanová case "a trauma for the Böhm family and the mother of Ľudmila Cervanová. It cannot be a trauma for the Slovak justice system."Trnka also said that the 1990 appeal had been submitted by Tibor Böhm and current Czech ombudsman Otakar Motejl, as former defense counsel for the accused. "Given the hectic nature of the period when the decision [freeing the accused and sending the case back for retrial] was issued, the public should form its own opinion of the approach that was taken," Trnka said.But Allan Böhm, the son of Tibor Böhm, told The Slovak Spectator that Trnka had not been telling the truth."My father never acted as counsel in this case. The attorney general's statement is false," he said."I have no trauma from the Cervanová case, but occasionally I feel a sense of trauma from everything that has gone on around it, and at the fact that those people who should be looking for the truth here are continually shutting their eyes at what has been done in the name of justice."
http://spectator.sk/articles/view/26212/

Cervanová witnesses break 30-year silence
Murdered girl got into car with men not resembling accused, couple says 18 Dec 2006 Ľuba Lesná Politics & Society
Jozef and Veronika B., a Bratislava married couple, say they saw the murder victim get into a car with three dark-skinned occupants - and that the courts were not interested in their testimony.
photo: Ľuba Lesná

LESS THAN a week after the Supreme Court confirmed jail sentences for six men accused of raping and murdering young medical student Ľudmila Cervanová in 1976, a pair of witnesses who saw Cervanová getting into a car with men who did not resemble the accused have come forward.
In an exclusive interview with The Slovak Spectator, a Bratislava husband and wife in their 60s, Veronika and Jozef B., told the newspaper that what they had seen on the night of July 9, 1976 conflicted with the court's verdict.They also said they had tried to deliver the information to the Supreme Court before it delivered its ruling, which cannot be appealed, but were turned away.As The Slovak Spectator has reported, the Supreme Court on December 4 confirmed the verdict of a lower court sentencing six men from Nitra for the Cervanová crime, and even raised the jail time of three of the men. Miloš Kocúr and Milan Andrášik had their sentences increased from 13 to 15 years, and Stanislav Dúbravický from 10 to 12.At the same time, the court failed to take into account 8,000 pages of witness statements and other evidence that police collected from 1976 to 1981, but that was later hidden in a police archives in Levoča, and only rediscovered in 2004. The court decided that it had enough evidence to be sure of the men's guilt without reviewing the additional files.Veronika and Jozef B. have already once given evidence in this case, on August 23, 1976. Their statement forms part of the ignored Levoča files, although it was not until they recently saw a report on the JOJ TV station featuring defense attorney Allan Bohm that they thought their testimony might prevent a miscarriage of justice."On the TV footage we saw excerpts from our witness statements," said Jozef B. "So I decided to testify again. On Thursday, November 30, I went down to the Supreme Court, and the doorkeeper called the court spokeperson, Eva Rupcová, for me. She told me over the phone to wait, and said she would ask the chairman of the senate [the head of the panel of judges ruling on the appeal]. After a few minutes she called me back and said that the chairman had said the giving of evidence was over, and that if I had anything new I should go to the police."Jozef B.'s words were confirmed for The Slovak Spectator by Rupcová. When the newspaper contacted the chairman of the senate, Štefan Michalík, on his mobile telephone on December 14, he hung up."I don't have too much faith in the police," Jozef B. continued, "so I went to the Attorney General's Office. They told me that they would call me, but to this day no one has."The testimonyJozef and Veronika described the night Cervanová was murdered for The Slovak Spectator. They said they remembered the date, because it is Veronika's birthday. The pair were waiting for a bus in the Mlynská Dolina student complex around 22:00, after having brought flowers to the nearby grave of their son."We could hear the music from the disco near the student hostel at the grave," said Jozef. "It was dark, a little before 10 at night, and we decided to take a bus home. We just missed one, and ended up waiting until about 22:30. About 22:15 we noticed a young girl with a big travel bag walking along the sidewalk. She was very pretty, about 20 years old."The girl stopped to talk with Veronika. "She asked me if we had seen the bus leave, because she was in a big hurry. She said she was traveling to Košice, and she was afraid she wouldn't catch the last train. She told me that if she saw a car she would try and hitchhike to the train station," Veronika B. told The Slovak Spectator.Veronika, Jozef and the girl continued to wait at the bus stop, along with two or three other people - young girls going home from the disco, and a drunk man who kept shouting.Another witness questioned by police, who lived in a nearby house, also said he had heard male shouts on the night Cervanová was murdered.Just before 22:30, a two-door Volkswagen "beetle" approached the bus stop from a road that led out of the parking lot near the student hostel. The car was travelling slowly and had only its parking lights on. "It stopped a few metres from the bus stop, heading in the direction of the town", said Jozef B. "I don't know if the girl flagged them down or whether they stopped of their own volition. But I noticed that the passenger sitting by the driver had an open window."The girl approached the car, and spoke briefly with the occupants, whom Jozef and Veronika described as three men. The man in the passenger seat then got out of the car to move his seat forward, holding the door while the girl put her bag in the back and took a seat herself. "We saw them the whole time this was happening, because the interior car light was on while the door was open," said Jozef."All three of the occupants of the car had dark skin. It was clear that they were not from our country, not white. They were Arab or black. The one who got out of the car was tall, dark-skinned, with short dark hair. After the girl got in, he put the seat back and got in himself. The car moved off slowly."Veronika said she had thought it was strange that even though the car was headed to town, it had not turned on its headlights. For that reason, she says, she wrote down the license plate number on a piece of paper. "It started W 24, or 25, I didn't see any more. But it had Austrian plates, from Vienna. The girl got in the car of her own free will."Jozef added that during the entire 40 minutes the couple waited at the bus stop, no one else left the student hostel, where Cervanová lived.The colour of the skin of the culprits is significant not only for their identification, but also in terms of a possible motive. Cervanová's father, Colonel Ľudovít Cervan, had been the Czechoslovak military attaché to Syria and Saudi Arabia. At the time his daughter was murdered he was posted to a secret military base in Piešťany where he taught pilots from mainly Arab countries how to use weapons electronics on fighter jets.Police statementWhen the couple noticed a police appeal, several weeks after the night in question, for anyone who knew anything about the kidnapping and murder of Cervanová to come forward, they recognized the victim, and decided to testify. They both had statements taken. Veronika was even shown a photograph of the corpse, which police claimed was Ľudmila Cervanová, although Veronika said, unlike the autopsy report, that the face of the victim was horribly bruised, not swollen from days of immersion in the water."She was just a mass of bruises. She wasn't cut up. One policeman also told me she had been found dumped beside a creek, not in the water [as the prosecution claimed]. I couldn't sleep for years afterwards, and I kept seeing that face in front of my eyes. The only thing that told me it was her was her long black hair."Two weeks after giving evidence, Veronika was leaving a church with her year-old son and an older neighbour. Two men in suits suddenly grabbed her arms and pulled her into a car, claiming that they were police, and that she would have to give evidence again. "I asked them, what kind of police are you?" Veronika told The Slovak Spectator. "If you want to interview me again, come to our place, because I can't leave my son in a baby carriage on the sidewalk."As people from the church gathered around the car, Veronika says, she managed to open another door and escape. The men did not pursue her.Two years later, in 1978, Veronika was working for the post office when she received a visit from a policeman who told her not to interfere with the Cervanová case, or she would be sorry. Both she and her husband henceforth stopped concerning themselves with what had happened to their testimony."We expected to be called to testify in court, but no one called us," said Jozef. "So we left it at that. My wife was scared."Break in the caseThe six men from Nitra were originally found guilty of the kidnapping, rape and murder of Cervanová in 1982. In 1990, however, the federal Czechoslovak Supreme Court overturned the verdict and returned the case to a lower court for retrial, citing 72 procedural errors that had been made in the original proceedings.Jozef and Veronika B. said they hoped that the verdict would mean a fresh start for the Ľudmila Cervanová case, but the courts failed to perform any additional measures to secure new evidence. "Sixteen years went by and nothing happened," Jozef said.Following his recent failure to interest the Supreme Court with his evidence, Jozef B. contacted The Slovak Spectator, saying his conscience would not allow him to remain silent, even though it might be too late, given that the Supreme Court verdict was final.International human rights groups and media, including the Austrian ORF station, have begun taking an interest in the case since the December 4 verdict, while defense attorney Bohm says he will turn to the Slovak Constitutional Court and the European Court for Human Rights in Strasbourg for redress."For me, the fact that 8,000 pages of evidence were found in the Levoča archives is proof that the investigation of the murder of Ľudmila Cervanová was grossly manipulated from the beginning," he said for The Slovak Spectator."Evidence was secured that the organs in the criminal justice system knew about, and that they in all likelihood withheld deliberately from the courts."
http://www.spectator.sk/articles/view/25868/

Cervanová accused head back to jail
Supreme Court adds time to sentences, ignores hidden evidence 11 Dec 2006 Ľuba Lesná Politics & Society
Accused Milan Andrášik (left) consults with his defense counsel at the Supreme Court on December 4. Andrášik and three other men will be heading back to jail for a crime they maintain they didn't commit.
photo: ČTK

THE SUPREME Court handed down a final verdict on December 4 in the 1976 rape and murder of medical student Ľudmila Cervanová, confirming the guilt of six men who have already done time for the crime, and even adding jail time for four of them.
The decision, which ends the longest criminal case in Slovak history, shocked the defendants, who had been hoping that the discovery in 2004 of 8,000 pages of witness statements originally collected by state investigators from 1976 to 1981 but then buried in a secret police archives would convince the court to overturn their convictions."We will be submitting a special appeal to the Supreme Court as well as constitutional challenges," said Alan Böhm, counsel for the defence. "Then we will be taking this case to the European Court for Human Rights in Strasbourg. Luckily, we are now part of Europe."Meanwhile, human rights activists spoke of mounting a campaign in support of the men.None of these responses, however, alter the fact that four of the men - Milan Andrášik, Miloš Kocúr, František Čerman and Stanislav Dúbravický - will be returning to jail, 16 years after being released under a 1990 Czechoslovak federal court verdict which found 72 procedural errors in their original trial.Nor do they alter the belief of the prosecution, the courts and a large part of Slovak society that the defendants got what they had coming to them. The presiding judge at the December 4 court session, Štefan Michalík, said that "it is a good thing for the accused that Slovakia no longer has the death penalty".The crime
Prosecutor Vlachovský.
photo: ČTK

The six men (a seventh, Roman B., was excused from the proceedings for poor health) were declared guilty of abducting Cervanová, then a medical student, from the Unic disco in Bratislava's Mlynská Dolina university complex, raping her in an apartment in a different part of the city, and then drowning her in a nearby lake after she threatened to go to the police.
Criminal law expert Juraj Kolesár, the former defense counsel for Milan Andrášik, one of the accused, told The Slovak Spectator that the case was unusual. "This case is a rarity due to the fact that there is not a single physical piece of evidence of the guilt of the accused, which means that this must have been the perfect murder. And in history that has almost never happened."The guilt of the seven men, all of whom were from Nitra, rests on confessions the police secured from three of them in the early 1980s. However, all of the accused said they were forced to confess by threats of capital punishment, or by being lodged in cells with career criminals who had been bribed to torment them.In October 1990, the Czechoslovak Supreme Court released them from jail, on the grounds that the lower courts had not allowed them to defend themselves properly. The case was returned to a lower court with instructions to repair the 72 procedural and factual errors that had occured in the investigation and the court trial. However, in the 16 years since that verdict, neither the Bratislava regional court nor the Supreme Court addressed these concerns.The Levoča archive
Stanislav Dubravický will also have to do time.
photo: ČTK

As The Slovak Spectator reported earlier, in 2004 defense attorneys located a file in a police archives in Levoča named "Ján H." (the name of the man first accused of the crime but later released). According to the information of The Slovak Spectator, investigators released Ján H. from custody not only because he had an alibi for July 9, 1976, but also because he was a close friend of the son of the general secretary of the Czechoslovak Communist Party, Gustáv Husák. The file contains 8,000 pages of witness testimony and other documents related to the Cervanová murder.
Among other things, the evidence hidden away in Levoča under mysterious circumstances in the 1980s shows that top officials in the Communist Party followed the course of the investigation very closely. A letter dated October 1, 1976 and signed by a Major Kubala, the head of the investigation division of the federal police, contains the following statement: "Please find attached photographs related to the murder of Ľudmila Cervanová for the use of General Secretary Gustáv Husák".The interest of top party functionaries in the case was likely related to the fact that Lieutenant Colonel Ľudovít Cervan, the father of Ľudmila Cervanová, according to information obtained by The Slovak Spectator had been the military attaché for Czechoslovakia in Libya and Saudi Arabia. At the time his daughter was murdered, Cervan was assigned to an air force base in Piešťany on a program called "Flight Training for Foreign Applicants". Cervan was a specialist in weaponry electronics for fighter jets, and lectured mostly military students from Arab countries.The communist leadership concealed the existence of such training courses; the public did not find out about them until after the 1989 revolution.
Miloš Kocúr was devastated by the decision.
photo: ČTK

The Levoča archives evidence also contains the transcripts of the police questioning of three Arabs who were at the Unic Club the night Cervanová was abducted and killed, as well as witness statements identifying the kidnappers as having dark skin, as if of Arab or African descent. A criminal law expert who asked to remain anonymous said that the secrecy of the military training courses would have been a sufficient motive for the regime to follow the investigation closely, and even to steer it towards certain suspects, such as seven young men from Nitra who until 1981 were not suspected of involvement.
In total, the archives contains the depositions of 315 witnesses who were at the disco on the night Cervanová was killed. However, the Supreme Court has refused to admit the evidence since it was unearthed. "The claim of the defence that the file was manipulated and that proof was buried is unfounded," said Supreme Court justice Michalík. "The evidence that was secured was sufficient to ascertain what happened, and represent an unbroken whole."Bratislava region prosecutor Robert Vlachovský also judged the files to be irrelevant to the case: "The guilt of the accused is proven by other evidence that is in the case file", he told journalists attending the trial.Defense attorney Böhm, however, told The Slovak Spectator that the police were simply not allowed to choose what evidence to use in a case: "The Constitutional Court has already ruled that a selective approach cannot be taken to evidence. That means that no one is allowed to choose what part of the evidence secured [i.e. witness statements] is included in the court file, and which is not. It also means that the court is simply not allowed to ignore such evidence."Federal court decisionThe Czechoslovak Federal Court decision of October 19, 1990 faulted the original court trial of 1982 for not including the evidence that eventually turned up in Levoča in 2004: "We regard it as another shortcoming in the [lower] court's approach that it did not take account of the evidence contained in the case file of accused Ján H., against whom charges were dropped. This file must contain information and evidence related to the case."Among the 315 witnesses who gave evidence, none claimed that the six men eventually jailed for the murder - František Čerman, Milan Andrášik, Stanislav Dúbravický, Juraj Lachman, Pavol Beďač, and Miloš Kocúr - were at the disco. Nor did they see any of the witnesses that in the early 1980s identified the "Nitra gang" Viera Z., Naďa B., Imrich O., and others.The Levoča evidence confirms the presence of only one later witness, Dr. Jozef Š., who figured in the first investigation, as well as in the later one when the case was re-opened under Prague investigator Eduard Pálka. However, Jozef Š.' testimony in 1976 differed from what he said in 1981. Jozef Š. himself said during one phase of the trial in the Bratislava Regional Court in 2003 that the police under Pálka had put so much pressure on him during his interrogation that he no longer knows what the truth is.However, Justice Michalík apparently disagreed with his counterpart at the federal Supreme Court, Vladimír Veselý, that the absence of the Ján H. file was a serious procedural flaw. Supreme Court spokeswoman Eva Rupcová said that "all of the evidence presented to the court, including the confessions of the accused, was so unequivocal that the court was of the opinion that no further evidence could change its decision."Nor did the court even deal with the issue of whether the fact 8,000 pages of evidence had been removed from the case file and hidden away under a "top secret" designation meant that someone had manipulated the case. "In the archives we found evidence that clearly confirms that the entire case from its beginning to this day was manipulated. Evidence was secured by the police and was in all probability deliberately concealed from the court," said Böhm.Conflicts in testimonyThe Supreme Court also did not remark on the differences in the testimony of witnesses before the Bratislava Region Court.The police version, which was upheld by the court in the 1980s, claimed that Milan Andrášik and František Čerman had been at the disco with two French girls named Silvia and Lydia Cohen, who were in Czechoslovakia visiting Čerman. The police even claimed that the two girls behaved so suggestively at the disco that everyone noticed them. For their part, the Cohen sisters demanded that the police take their statement, because they were convinced they had been at Unic, but the day before the kidnapping. The police, however, did not take their statements, because they regarded them as unreliable witnesses. The sisters then sent the police their diary that they had kept while in Bratislava, which bore out their version of events. The case investigators, however, claimed that the diary was a fake. Silvia Cohen did not actually testify in court until 2003, where she repeated her claim to have been with two of the accused at the disco on July 8, 1976. However, neither the regional court nor the Supreme Court took her testimony into account.Pressure from investigatorsAll seven men said they had been pressured into confessing by the case investigators. Milan Andrášik also said he had been housed with a brutal inmate who threatened to kill him if he didn't confess. The inmate, Ivan Fagan, confirmed the story for the Nový Čas daily on March 22, 2001: "We were put together in cell 226. Yes, I threatened him, and I forced him to write a confession. I hid it in a book jacket, which was given to the investigator according to our agreement. I told him [Andrášik]: "Hang yourself, you bastard! What are you living for? Yes, I forced him to do it. And that confession was the principal evidence used in court."But Michalík denied the charge: "The appeal court came to the conclusion that the confession of the accused that was secured in pre-trial proceedings was not obtained illegally, by the use of violence. Conditions in pre-trial custody in such serious cases are tough and demanding. It's not like a holiday in a hotel room with full board."Witness Jozef Š. in 2003 also spoke of pressure from the police: "Facts were suggested to me, often accompanied by the threat that I would not be allowed to complete school. My mother died, and they detained me for 24 hours, demanding that I give evidence. But they would not give me a statement to sign until I gave them names they had dictated to me, and which they wanted to get into the statement."Witness Peter O. also told the Bratislava court he had given evidence under pressure: "During the interrogations they put pressure on me. A guy came in and asked them what they were playing at, that they should just belt me a couple of times, and that they would get what they wanted from me one way or another. Yes, I was afraid."The worst pressure was probably applied to crown witness Viera Z., whom police detained several times for 48 hours in pre-trial proceedings despite the fact she was never charged, and that she was first pregnant, and later nursing a child. She told The Slovak Spectator that the police had said they would hold here, and thus separate her from her baby, until she confessed that she had been at the disco in 1976 and had later gone with the seven men to the flat where she had witnessed the rape and then the murder of Ľudmila Cervanová. In order to secure her release, she did as the police wished.She only later realized she could not have been at the disco because she had been on a school rafting trip on Revištské Podzámčie, 180 kilometres from Bratislava. Given that all 34 members of the trip confirmed her story, and said she had not been absent a single day, the police came up with the story that she had slipped away on the evening of July 9 and hitchhiked to Bratislava, attended the disco, gone to the flat and watched a mass rape and murder, and then been driven back to Revištské Podzámčie in such silence that her return to her tent had not even been noticed by her tent-mate. Viera Z. said this theory was illogical, and that she would have had no reason to leave her tent and hitchhike to Bratislava. She also asked the investigators to verify whether such a trip was even technically possible, but her request was denied. In court, when she denied the police version, she was found guilty of perjury and sentenced to 2.5 years in jail.The federal court in 1990 ordered that the people who had been with Viera Z. be questioned and that the court verify whether it was possible to do the trip as the police claimed, but until this day this has not been done.When this reporter visited Revištské Podzámčie, we found the camp where Viera. Z's class had stayed, and where students have camped for decades. It is on the Hron River, and the only way Viera Z. could have got to Bratislava would have been to walk several kilometres through a thick forest in the dark (her friends testified they had seen her around the campfire), or take a 15 or 20 minute walk to an access road after swimming the Hron, which at this point is wide and deep.
http://www.spectator.sk/articles/view/25371/

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