The Federal Public Prosecutor General of Germany, Peter Frank, has no knowledge of the investigators' report cited by the German daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung as well as the Slovak paper DennikN. This was confirmed for the media by Prosecutor General Jaromír Čižnár on Monday after a meeting with his counterpart. Moreover, Čižnár did not confirm the German side would have requested to interview the ministry's chief of protocol Radovan Čulák.
Germany requested Slovakia to provide legal assistance in the investigation of the kidnapped Vietnamese entrepreneur Trinh Xuan Thanh, also lodging a European investigation order. Slovak Prosecutor General Jaromír Čižnár:
"Slovakia's legal assistance was highly professional. German investigators were provided with the highest conditions. We rejected nothing they asked for."
The chief editor of the Slovak daily DenníkN Matúš Kostolný thinks that the statements by the Prosecutor General Čižnár underline on the one hand the fact that the German authorities are satisfied with Slovak cooperation, but on the other hand he personally finds that the Slovak authorities are not handling the affair in a proactive manner. Matúš Kostolný:
"I repeatedly said that the Prosecutor General had not been informed satisfactorily by colleagues from the secret services or police about the fact that they had any knowledge about the kidnapping itself."
As Čižnár further informed, the supervising prosecutors in the investigation taking place on the territory of the Slovak Republic plan to exempt a total of 44 persons from the pledge of confidentiality who might later testify in the case. "The interviews are in progress, and the order of the interviews is determined by those who are carrying them out," said the Slovak prosecutor general, asking for patience.
One of the topics discussed at the meeting was the idea of setting up a joint investigation team. Čižnár stated that Germany was not in favour of creating a joint investigation team as the crime was committed on German territory.
