Bratislava (AFP)

Slovak prosecutors said on Monday they were looking into contacts between politicians and the alleged sponsor of the murder of investigative journalist Jan Kuciak, who was killed in February 2018.

This announcement comes in the wake of leaks in the texting media where suspects brag about their relationship with politicians, including former Prime Minister Robert Fico, forced to resign following the assassination of Kuciak and his fiancée .

"Representatives of public authorities of different levels contacted Marian" Kocner, the entrepreneur accused of ordering the murder of the journalist who had investigated his activities, told reporters a special prosecutor on condition of anonymity, without give names.

"I strongly urge these people to come forward and personally explain these communications," said the magistrate, adding that the officials in question may have committed crimes.

Demonstrations prompted Fico to step down, but he remains in charge of the left-wing populist Smer-SD party and has close relations with his successor Peter Pellegrini.

Five people are accused of double murder, including real estate developer Kocner and his former interpreter Alena Zs.

Kocner says he is innocent, according to his lawyer Marek Para. The latter did not deny the authenticity of the texts quoted in the press, but said that their content "does not concern at all the act" reproached to his client.

In his chats with Alena Zs, Kocner calls Fico "Square Head", as his compatriots often do.

"I'm afraid Square Head will not get away with it," Kocner wrote a few days after the crime.

Later, when Fico had already left his post, Kocner told his correspondent that he was going to "visit Square Head and kick him in the back."

Last week Fico blamed the opposition and the media for "a kind of jihad" against him and his party.

An analyst in Bratislava, Pavol Babos, thinks that "it is not excluded that Kocner boasted of things that were not true, to make a great impression".

It is too early, he told AFP, whether the texting affair will have an impact on the legislative elections scheduled for March 2020. But both Fico and his former interior minister Robert Kalinak "are permanently losing their potential to create a coalition ".

© 2019 AFP