Kmenta: Mrázek murder tied to Gross bribery tapes in new book

Journalist Jaroslav Kmenta argues in his new book Proč zabili Mrázka (“Why They Killed Mrázek”) that the 2006 murder of the Czech “godfather” František Mrázek was linked to secret recordings of former prime minister Stanislav Gross, on which he allegedly takes bribes. The book is published on 5 November 2026.

Two books under one cover

According to Kmenta, who has worked on the case for 20 years and previously wrote the trilogy Kmotr Mrázek, the new work consists of two parts subtitled “Kompro na Grosse I.” and “Kompro na Grosse II.” It runs to 736 pages plus 16 pages of illustrations. It is a work of investigative non-fiction in which the author cites numerous witnesses and documents.

What the author claims

In Kmenta’s version of events, Gross took bribes and was secretly recorded. The recordings ended up with Mrázek, who began blackmailing the former prime minister. “This is the key starting point, which happened twenty years ago and ultimately led to Mrázek’s murder,” the journalist said.

He is convinced that since 2006, parts of the police and the intelligence services have deliberately tried to conceal this motive, destroy the compromising material, and discredit or even eliminate witnesses. In Kmenta’s view, this is the biggest failure and abuse of state power since November 1989.

Two linked deaths

According to the author, the recordings in Gross’s flat in Prague’s Barrandov district were made by Jiří Kubín, then head of the Lenia security agency. He sold them to Mrázek, and soon afterwards both men were dead.

Mrázek was shot by a hired gunman on 25 January 2006, and the murder remains unsolved. Kubín was gunned down by a group of hired killers on 13 March 2006. That case was solved only in part: five people went to prison who had been hired for the killing and who, according to police, organised it. The police never established who ordered the murder or why. “There simply was no motive. That’s the truth,” Josef Lottes, then head of the Prague murder investigation unit, says in the book.

Kmenta is certain that had the motive for Kubín’s murder been established, it would also have opened the way to solving the Mrázek case, because the two deaths are connected.

The key witness

The author names Kubín’s longtime friend Vladimír Petrus as the main witness to the existence of the Gross recordings. The two had known each other since their army service in the 1980s. Kubín trusted him so much that he gave him access rights to a bank safe-deposit box, where he allegedly kept the secret recordings from Gross’s flat.

Petrus heard some of the recordings: Kubín played them to him a month before his death. Petrus later said that Kubín confirmed he had made the recordings himself and sold them to Mrázek.

Petrus himself was later accused of ordering Kubín’s murder. Kmenta refutes this in the book: in his words, Petrus was kept in prison so that he would stay silent about what he heard on the recordings from the former prime minister’s flat, and so that the recordings would never see the light of day.

Around Prague, based on reporting by novinky.cz