Kauza Cervanová
Murder Case Summary
A young, female, pretty medical student was found murdered, with hands tied behind her back, lying in a creek not far from the nation's capital Bratislava. She had been last seen alive the previous night, leaving to catch a late train, departing from her college dormitory located in what resembles a huge campus area, notorious in Bratislava for excesses of student life.
After five years of investigations, the Communist police, in 1981, arrested 7 young men, the victim's (Ľudmila Cervanová's) peers and likewise students at the time when the murder occurred. They were charged with raping and murdering Ľudmila, and convicted to long prison terms -- even though no positive evidence of *rape* was found, and even though the case against the 7 men rested largely (exclusively?) on circumstantial evidence. No incontrovertible proof against the 7 was ever produced.
Now, the weird thing about that is, that the 7 men came from respectable families -- respectable in the eyes of the Communist totalitarian regime of (Czecho-)Slovakia in those years, that is. To quite a few impartial observers, the fact that sons hailing from Communist families were charged with the murder, was proof enough that the Communist police did a good, unbiased investigative job -- that they did not shirk from labelling some of "their own" as the culprits. Others were not so convinced; while the 7 men may have come from Communist families, they were by no means families of *top* Communist officials. And so, conspiracy theorists would opine that the regime may have sacrificed some of their "lesser servants" in order to, perhaps, protect those who were even higher up in the hierarchy.
To complicate matters further, there's even a possible Arab connection -- yes, that all happened back in 1976, a full quarter century before 9-11. Ludmila's father, an army officer, used to train pilots from various Arab countries (those befriended with the Soviet Bloc of that era); they used to take flying lessons in Slovakia. Now, some witnesses claim they saw Ľudmila getting into a car driven by someone with a Mid-Eastern complexion. Those witnesses were either not properly examined by the police, or their evidence was brushed aside; the verdict against the 7 Slovak young men was pronounced in 1981 anyway, after even the Communist President of Czechoslovakia, Husák, pushed for a resolution of the case.
The Communist regime in Czechoslovakia collapsed in November 1989. The case was brought to a renewed trial, and after a couple of years, the court ordered a release of the 7 prisoners, stating that the original investigation had not been impartial. Yet that was not enough justification for the 7 men: they plead their full innocence, and they started a lengthy (and I mean, *really* lengthy: lasting well into the 21st century) process of legal rehabilitation for themselves.
Little did they know what the result of their efforts would be: in a renewed trial in 2006, a top Slovak court concluded that the original police investigation of 1981 had been, after all, impartial enough. It reaffirmed the guilt of the 7 men, and even increased the original prison term sentences imposed on them back in 1981. Some of the earstwhile prisoners -- those with the longest original sentences -- had to return to prison in 2006, a full 30 years after the murder, and 25 years after the original trial, to spend a few more years in jail.