Petőcz Kálmán (szerk.): National Populism and Slovak - Hungarian Relations in Slovakia 2006-2009 (Somorja, 2009)
Annex
The Case of Hedviga Malinová the distance from the crime scene to the university’s Hungarian department. Again, a policewoman in mufti stood in for Malinová; like before, her lawyer was not informed about the experiment’s conclusions. The next day, Róbert Benci was again questioned at the Office of Attorney General. The investigators were particularly interested in Benci’s sympathies with extremist groupings but Benci denied any. Benci was also asked to provide a handwriting specimen to be compared to the inscription on Malinová’s blouse. On the same day, the special task force also summoned Marcel Grzyb who resembled the assailant from the other identikit but Grzyb did not show up. On December 11, 2007, investigators from the special task force questioned for eight and a half hours Peter Horák, the investigator who led the 17-day investigation of the attack on Malinová.30 Horák questioned Malinová three times: twice on the day of the attack in Nitra and Dunajská Streda hospitals and on September 9 when he tried to make her confess that she had lied. According to Kvasnica, each of the three interrogations was unlawful: the former two because the victim was heavily sedated; furthermore, the one in Nitra was also illegal because it was carried out before investigation of the case was officially launched; the latter because Malinová was taken to the Nitra police under a false pretext, because she was under duress and because the interrogation was attended by persons not identified in the transcript. DoCTOREd VidfOTApE When Roman Kvasnica received videotapes from the September 9 interrogation, he was surprised to find out that it was only a torso of the recording. Although the interior minister cited a nearly six-hour recording to prove that Hedviga Malinová had lied through her teeth, the recording shown to Kvasnica had a running time of only three hours and 20 minutes. Later, the Office of Attorney General disclosed an additional recording with a running time of about one hour. Kvasnica’s main intention was to compare the recording to the interrogation’s official transcript and confront case investigators regarding potential differences but the incomplete recording rendered that ambition impossible. Kvasnica concluded that the videotape had been edited because it did not correspond to the official interrogation transcript. The recording was free of any displays of duress the witness was reportedly subjected to; for instance, it did not reveal interrogators’ threats that Malinová would be detained if she refused to confess that she had made the whole thing up. 315
