Officials said the condition of Prime Minister Robert Fico had stabilized, hours after his shooting. The government was expected to focus on Thursday on security breaches.
A day after Slovakia’s prime minister, Robert Fico, was critically wounded in what his government called a politically motivated assassination attempt, attention focused on Thursday on the security breaches that allowed the attack to occur.
Mr. Fico’s condition has stabilized after five hours of emergency surgery, senior officials said late Wednesday. News reports on Thursday cited hospital and government officials saying, however, that his situation was still “very serious.”
The Reuters news agency reported that the government would convene a meeting of security officials on Thursday.
A former police chief, Stefan Hamran, said in an interview with Dennik N, a news outlet, that Mr. Fico’s security detail had acted unprofessionally during and after the attack and blamed them for scenes of chaos. “There was chaos, that’s obvious, and it’s a failure,” he said.
Political tempers in the deeply polarized Central European nation have been rising after Mr. Fico’s shooting, with the prime minister’s allies accusing their opponents of having “blood on their hands” and of stoking the violent hatred that they blamed for the shooting.
The interior ministry in Bratislava, the Slovak capital, called for calm. “Let’s stop spreading hate and calls for violence,” the ministry said overnight on a website it operates dedicated to fighting “hoaxes and frauds.”
