Stories from the captured state

In 2023, Robert Fico became Prime Minister of Slovakia for the fourth time. He had previously been forced from office after journalist Ján Kuciak and his fiancée Martina Kušnírová were brutally murdered — an assassination for which Marian Kočner, a man who called Fico his "boss," faces trial to this day. Before that trial even began, Slovak journalists received an unexpected gift: a leak of the entire investigative file — more than 70 terabytes of data, much of it seized from the villas of Marian Kočner, a man notorious for collecting compromising material on the rich and powerful. What journalists uncovered from that trove revealed not only the character of the man charged with ordering a journalist's murder, but the character of the system that had flourished beneath him. Slovakia was a captured state. These are the stories from that captured state.