Police exhume remains of Jan Masaryk to investigate his 1948 death

At the Lány cemetery outside Prague, police have carried out an exhumation of the remains of Jan Masaryk — son of Czechoslovakia's first president, Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, and himself the country's foreign minister, who died under mysterious circumstances in March 1948. The Czech police announced the move.

"Today at the Lány cemetery we are carrying out investigative work as part of the review into the circumstances of Jan Masaryk's death in 1948 — exhuming his remains and examining them using the latest forensic methods," police said in a statement. According to investigators, the main goal is either to disprove or confirm decades of speculation surrounding his death.

"We believe today's actions will bring us closer to establishing the circumstances that led to Jan Masaryk's death," police added. Present at the site were the lead investigator, former head of Prague's homicide division Jan Mareš, and a forensic expert. Sounds of a jackhammer and a running saw could be heard coming from the area where the forensic team was working.

What is known about the case

Jan Masaryk died on the night of March 10, 1948. According to the official version, it was suicide — he fell from a window of the Foreign Ministry building shortly after the Communists seized power in Czechoslovakia. However, that version has never satisfied many historians and relatives of the deceased.

In January of last year, the Office for the Documentation and Investigation of the Crimes of Communism reopened the case, citing well-founded suspicions that the death may have been a murder. The reopening was prompted by newly obtained documents from diplomatic archives in France, the United States and the United Kingdom, the contents of which have not yet been disclosed.

Previous attempts to clarify the circumstances of Masaryk's death have repeatedly ended without result. Jan Masaryk himself became foreign minister of the London-based exile government in 1940 and retained the post in the postwar cabinets of Prime Ministers Zdeněk Fierlinger and Klement Gottwald. In February 1948, he chose not to join the resignation of non-Communist ministers and instead witnessed the Communist takeover firsthand — a month later he was found dead.

Around Prague, based on reporting by novinky.cz