Security men bundle a wounded Robert Fico into a limousine shortly after he was shot.<\/p>\n
Slovakia\u2019s Prime Minister Fico was no longer in a \u2018life-threatening condition, following an operation that went well, according to Deputy prime minister Tom\u00e1\u0161 Taraba.<\/p>\n
Slovakia\u2019s interior minister, Mat\u00fa\u0161 \u0160utaj-E\u0161tok, said the perpetrator of the attack fired at Fico five times. He said initial information \u201cclearly points to a political motivation\u201d. A suspect was in custody, the country\u2019s president, Zuzana Caputova, said in a televised statement.<\/p>\n
According to the news publisher Denn\u00edk N, Fico was shot in the abdomen and left arm.<\/p>\n
Robert Fico<\/strong>, Slovakia\u2019s prime minister, was shot today in the town of Handlov\u00e1, where he had been meeting supporters, and taken to hospital.<\/p>\n Born into a working-class family on 15 September 1964, Fico \u2013 a lawyer by profession \u2013 began his political career with the Communist party shortly before the 1989 Velvet Revolution that led to the breakup of former Czechoslovakia.<\/p>\n He set up his centre-left Smer-SD party in 1999 after being turned down for a ministerial post by the Democratic Left, the Communists\u2019 political heirs.<\/p>\n Embroiled in allegations of corruption he has always denied, Fico is brash and outspoken, with a penchant for bodybuilding, football and fast cars.<\/p>\n Fico admires both Vladimir Putin, saying he would not permit the Russian president\u2019s arrest under an international warrant if he came to Slovakia, and Hungary\u2019s illiberal leader, Viktor Orb\u00e1n, \u201cwho defends the interests of his country and his people\u201d.<\/p>\n The Smer leader is also a tactician: in a three-decade career, he has navigated successfully between mainstream, pro-EU positions and a fiercely nationalist, anti-western rhetoric destined mainly for domestic consumption, proving more than willing to change tack depending on public opinion or political reality.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Crucially the Slovakian prime minister was pro-Putin and pro-Russian. Having recently withheld military aid for Ukraine, he was in the process of re-aligning Slovakia away from the West toward Moscow<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":39262,"featured_media":287577,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[58],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-287574","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-Current_Affairs"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/287574","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/39262"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=287574"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/287574\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":287644,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/287574\/revisions\/287644"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/287577"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=287574"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=287574"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=287574"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}