The United Nations cultural organisation on Wednesday deplored the slaying of a Slovak investigative reporter who linked the Italian mafia to high-level political corruption in his country and urged an in-depth probe of his killing.
“I condemn the murder of Jan Kuciak,” said UNESCO director-general Audrey Azoulay.
“Journalists have the right to fulfil their mission to inform without fearing for their lives," she went on.
"I call on the authorities to thoroughly investigate this case and bring the perpetrators of this crime to trial,” Azoulay said.
Kuciak, a 27-year-old investigative journalist, who worked for news portal Aktuality.sk, and his partner, Martina Kusnirova, where shot dead on Sunday at their home in Veka Maca, some 50 kilometers from the Slovak capital, Bratislava.
In his last, unfinished article, Kuciak alleged that businessmen in eastern Slovakia with links to Calabria's powerful Ndrangheta mafia are embezzling European Union structural funds and claimed they have high-level political ties in the country.
Slovak premier Robert Fico has offered a one million euro reward for anyone who comes forward with information about the murder.
According to earlier media reports, a senior advisor to Fico was among those being probed.
Like fellow murdered Maltese journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia, Kuciak worked on the Panama Papers scandal.
Kuciak's murder was the first killing of a journalist in Slovakia since the country became a member of the EU in 2004.
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