Slovakia’s Prime Minister Robert Fico. Photo: Collected
Slovakia's Prime Minister Robert Fico was battling life-threatening wounds Wednesday after officials said he was shot multiple times in an assassination attempt condemned by European leaders.
Dramatic footage from the scene in central Slovakia shows security agents grabbing a wounded Fico from the ground and hustling him into a black car that speeds away as police handcuff a person on the pavement.
Police detained the suspected gunman at the site of attack in Handlova, outgoing Slovak President Zuzana Caputova told reporters after the seemingly unprecedented act of violence against a Slovak prime minister.
"I am shocked, we are all shocked by the terrible and heinous attack," she added.
Fico was shot multiple times, said a post on his official Facebook page. "Today, after the government meeting in Handlova, there was an assassination attempt" on Fico, the government said, adding he was flown to hospital "in a life-threatening condition".
Images from public television RTVS showed a person on a stretcher taken out of a helicopter by medics and wheeled into a hospital.
Handlova local hospital director Marta Eckhardtova said "Fico was brought into our hospital and he was treated at our vascular surgery clinic". She was unable to describe his injuries.
The Dennik N daily reported that Fico was still in the operating room after being taken to the hospital before 1400 GMT.
Fico, whose Smer-SD party won the general election last September, is a four-time prime minister and a political veteran accused of swaying his country's foreign policy in favour of the Kremlin.
Local media reported that the suspected gunman was a 71-year-old writer, but police have not name any suspects. "I have absolutely no idea what father was thinking, what he was planning, why it happened," the alleged suspect's son told Slovak news site aktuality.sk.
Analyst Grigorij Meseznikov told AFP "there has been no (previous) attack on any minister or prime minister in Slovakia."
"I only remember the case of former minister of economy Jan Ducky who was shot dead in 1999," he added. "But he had not been politically active anymore when he was killed."
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