The arrest of two alleged Russian spies in Slovenia in November last year was hailed a success for intelligence and security services at the time, but now it has become the subject of serious accusations against Prime Minister Robert Golob, who was accused of having intervened to postpone the date of the arrest of the suspects.
Golob has been accused of intervening on date of the arrest of the suspected spies because the original arrest date would have been a day after a major referendum and allegedly he did not want this to overshadow the government’s success.
The explosive claim was reportedly made by Tatjana Bobnar, a former interior minister who fell out with Golob over what she said was unwarranted pressure on the police force and resigned in December last year after just six months on the job.
She testified earlier this week at a parliamentary inquiry looking into suspected pressure on police and while that part of her testimony was not public, her statements quickly leaked and were picked up by several media outlets.
Golob has dismissed the claim saying that “this is yet another hallucination that is utterly untrue.” “No prime minister has the power to achieve that, let alone demand that,” he told a late-night TV show on Wednesday.
His assertion was backed up by SOVA, the national intelligence and security service, which issued a rare public statement saying that the claim Golob influenced the timing of the arrest was not true.
SOVA said it had planned its activities in conjunction with the special branch of police known as the National Bureau of Investigation, with the possible dates of the arrest proposed by the agency’s director “based on operational and tactical reasons, and most certainly not at the request of the prime minister or anyone else.”
The allegations are now being looked into by the parliamentary commission in charge of overseeing intelligence and security services, whose chair said that the information they have is inconsistent and merits further investigation.
They wish to determine “whether the arrest date was picked professionally or politically,” commission chair Viktor Žakelj, an opposition MP, said on Thursday.
Bobnar, the former interior minister, who now works as an advisor to the president, doubled down on her claim after Golob’s rebuttal. “She stands firmly behind her testimony and expects that the [inquiry] commission will do its job independently of various political pressure,” President Nataša Pirc Musar’s office said.
(Sebastijan R. Maček | sta.si)
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