STS Finds Kotleba Guilty, Sends Him to Prison for Four Years and Four Months

Bratislava, October 12 (TASR) – Specialised Criminal Court (STS) judge found head of the far-right LSNS party Marian Kotleba guilty of the crime of supporting and promoting groups aiming to suppress fundamental rights and freedoms, TASR learnt on Monday.

Judge Ruzena Sabova sentenced him to four years and four months in prison in the case of controversial cheques that Kotleba awarded to three poor families. He should serve his sentence in an institution with a minimum degree of guarding.

The judge thus complied with the final proposal of Special Prosecutor’s Office (USP) prosecutor Tomas Honz. In his closing speech at the end of September, he proposed to Kotleba a sentence in prison in the lower half of the penalty and serving the sentence in an institution with a minimum degree of guarding. The penalty in the Criminal Code for the deed ranges from four to eight years of imprisonment.

Kotleba was tried for distributing three charity cheques worth €1,488 in 2017. According to the Special Prosecutor’s Office and several experts that testified in court, the number 1488 has significance for extremists, as it’s a combination of the numbers 14 (standing for the Fourteen Words of right-wing terrorist David Lane) and 88 (as ‘H’ is the eighth letter in the alphabet, HH serves as an acronym for the Nazi salute ‘Heil Hitler’).