On the morning of 25 August 2006, Hevdig Malina, an ethnic-Hungarian student in Nitra (Hungarian: Nyitra, German: Neutra), Slovakia, arrived to the university grounds with a bloodied face. According to her later testimony, after hearing her talk to someone in Hungarian, two skinheads attacked her, beat her, tore the earring from her ears, wrote racist texts on her blouse, and stole the cell phone and her bag (her papers were later sent back anonymously in a package). (I mentioned it.)

Nationalist politicians on both sides soon raised their voices. Note that Slovakia is currently governed by a left-populist party in a crazy coalition with another left-populist and a far-right party, while in Hungary, the Right is in opposition and likes to accuse the government of not being patriotic and ignoring ethnic Hungarians abroad.

Soon came the twist: on 11 September, the head of police and the interior minister stood before the media, announced the end of investigation, and accused Malina of lying.

According to their hypothesis, Malina caused the (according to them minor) wounds to herself, either intentionally or in a fall, the writing on her blouse is her own handwriting, the stamps on the anonymously sent package with her papers contain her saliva, her cell phone wasn't used at the time so she couldn't have been overheard talking Hungarian on it, and her testimony was inconsistent.

This all in turn was denied by she and her lawyer. Strange moments: police based its opinion on a court forensic mediciner -- who looked at her ten days after the incident, while records of two hospitals where she was seen within a day weren't further considered. That Malina talked on a cell phone was something emerging in the media, but she never said it -- she said she talked to a Hungarian car driver asking for directions. She blames some real inconsistencies on shock and confusion and hostile treatment by police. Malina claims her saliva is on the stamps because she digged up the envelope from the dustbin after a week at police's request and had to fix the stamps back on. Police in turn claims the stamps are at their original place by the milimetre.

However, in November, someone whose identity was held secret accused Malina of bearing false witness before court, and the trial started against her this month.

But this is just the courts. Meanwhile, nationalists (including football hooligans) and politicians in Slovakia and Hungary practised a war of words. Politicians up to the highest offices: the Slovakian PM voiced personal opinion in the case, and the Hungarian PM even cancelled a regular meeting with his Slovakian counterpart. Things flared up again when the trial started, with both major parties in the Hungarian parliament voicing their negative opinion, which in turn was received as intrusion into internal affairs even by opposition parties in Slovakia.

The governments later tried to reduce tension, now a new meeting of PMs is tabled in two weeks, and yesterday the foreign ministers met, after which they declared that this should be a matter for the courts.

On the other hand, connections to the ethnic Hungarian minority party (MKP/SMK) in Slovakia didn't help things a bit. First there was the circumstance that Malina's first lawyer was an MP for this party. He soon resigned to cause no further acrimony, and since then Malina has a (very committed) ethnic-Slovakian lawyer. as it involved a quasi-coup bringing forth a new party president, who is widely expected to fail to reign in the party's nationalist wing (whose support he relied on) and made some quite silly moves in the media.

In Slovakia, the attitude of the media ranged from looking for instigators in the background based on a full acceptance of the charges of bearing false witness (Pravda) through procedural doubts (Sme) to accepting Malina's claims and seeing a case on par with the Michal Kováč Jr. case (Týždeň). In the latter opinions, findings of a (later fired) investigative reporter of the public TV and the review by former head of the police anti-corruption unit, Jozef Šátek, was influential.

They noted that the nine eyewitnesses of Malina's first appearance with bloodied face were questioned only in February, the graphologist who analysed the writing on the blouse didn't positively identify it with Malina's writing, just allowed the possibility, the claimed DNA evidence on stamps was not presented to court, her dirtied skirts were never investigated. The video tapes of Malina's interrogation the interior minister claimed as evidence against hostile policemen was not made public.

Meanwhile, the lawyer had Malina go through a 30-hour observation by a psychiatrist, who attested that she is telling the truth. It came out later that the psychiatrist is not dime-a-dozen, but one of Slovakia's top psychiatrists.

Then last week, the new twist: it was leaked to a newspaper that the secret accuser of Malina committed suicide three weeks ago, and left a suicide note. The man is said to have been a chauvinist. Authorities kept both the fact of the suicide and the text of the note secret, and still deny any influence on the trial. Later we learnt that there was a second accuser, an aide to a politician who used to be in the secret service (back in the time when the smaller left-populist party in the coalition ruled Slovakia, the Slovakian secret service was rather infamous). Former Slovak ambassador to the USA Martin Bútora hypothetised a secret service orchestration in an op-ed in liberal Sme, one that fomented a downturn in Hungarian-Slovakian relations.