Note: This is a separate case to the one covering the murder of the institute's former director. You can find stories on that in our Institute of Chemistry archive
STA, 14 May 2019 - Lebanese chemist Michel Stephan has been found guilty of soliciting to the murder of one of his former superiors at the National Institute of Chemistry, and sentenced to eight years in prison on Tuesday.
The Ljubljana District Court found that Stephan hired an Iraqi asylum seeker in 2017 to kill Janez Plavec, the head of the institute's NMR Centre.
The murder was never committed because the Iraqi named Ali alerted the police of the plot and helped them collect wiretapping evidence to arrest Stephan.
The case is separate from the murder of the institute's director Janko Jamnik in December 2014. The man charged with the murder, Milko Novič, has recently been acquitted, but the verdict is not final yet.
The prosecution had sought nine years and a half in prison for Stephan and his deportation from the country, alleging solicitation to a second-degree murder of and illicit arms trafficking.
The court found the defendant guilty on both counts, giving him seven years and 10 months in jail on the first count and four months on the second count, and sentencing him to an aggregate of eight years.
The panel of judges remanded the defendant in prison until he starts serving his sentence. However, they did not order his deportation, for want of sufficient enough reasons.
The presiding judge Sinja Božičnik said the panel found both counts had been proved beyond reasonable doubt.
She said one of the proofs was that the defendant had handed Plavec's picture to Ali, told him his home address, gave him directions to the house and told him how to get away.
The judge said that the defendant also gave Ali part of the reward money promised for the act, got him a gun, took him to the woods to practice shooting. "This has been corroborated not only by Ali's testimony, but also the evidence taken," said the judge.
In his closing arguments on Monday, Stephan's defence counsel, Gorazd Fišer, argued the possibility of a different interpretation of the events from the one presented by the prosecution.
However, the judge said today that no other version had been even presented, and that all the evidence showed everything happened the way it had been presented by the prosecution.
The court rejected Stephan's claim that the transcripts of his conversations with Ali that were intercepted by the police had been trampled with and mistranslated from Arabic.
"The verdict is what it is. It will have to be appealed," said Stephan's lawyer, but could not say yet what arguments the appeal would be based on, because he needed to get the judgement in writing first.
Prosecutor Petra Vugrinec welcomed the guilty verdict, but said she was not persuaded by the court's reasoning against deportation, suggesting she might appeal on that.
Noting that Stephan was a citizen of France, an EU country, the judge found that under EU rules the "threat against the public peace and order is not enough for deportation in this case".
Plavec's lawyer announced yesterday that in case of Stephan's conviction, he would file a damages suit against him.
Under the indictment Stephan wanted Plavec dead out of revenge because he blamed him for losing his job at the institute and for being banned from the institute's premises.
Background to the case
STA, 14 May 2019 – The prosecution was seeking nine years and a half in prison for Stephan and his deportation from the country, alleging his solicitation to the second-degree murder of Janez Plavec, the head of the institute's NMR Centre, and illicit arms trafficking.
The murder was never committed because the man allegedly hired by Stephan, an Iraqi named as Ali, alerted the police of the plot and the police then wire-tapped him to record his meetings with the defendant before collecting enough evidence to arrest Stephan.
The indictment alleges Stephan's motive was revenge because he blamed Plavec for losing his job at the institute and for being banned from the institute's premises.
Shortly before the end of the trial, prosecutor Petra Vugrinec changed the charge from solicitation to first-degree murder, which carries up to 30 years in prison, to solicitation to a second-degree murder, which carries up to 15.
In his testimony, Plavec said he did not know why Stephan would wish him dead, but he did say that in 2010 he opposed extending Stephan's employment contract, after which Stephen had to leave the institute.
"He obviously saw me as someone who prevented his return to the Chemistry Institute," Plavec told the court about the defendant in March.
Plavec expressed his opposition to extending Stephan's contract in response to an informal question put to him by the institute's boss Janko Jamnik, who was murdered in December 2014.
The man charged with Jamnik's murder, Milko Novič, has recently been acquitted in a retrial but the verdict is not yet final.
As the reason he opposed keeping Stephan, Plavec told the court about warnings about Stephan's unsuitability, including dissatisfaction expressed by the pharmaceutical company Lek as a major partner of the institute.
Plavec also alleged that Phosphoenix, a French company co-owned by Stephan and his immediate boss Barbara Mohar, got money for compounds developed by the institute's lab for the pharmaceutical company Krka.
He said the late Jamnik had tried to get information about money transfers to Phosphoenix, but the French authorities would not yield it. He expressed the hope that the case would be investigated by law enforcement.
The trial, which started with a pre-trial hearing more than a year ago, heard that Stephan took Ali to the woods in Ljubljana in October 2017 in order to see how well he could handle a weapon.
Having already started collaborating with the police, Ali was bugged. Translated transcriptions of the wiretaps read to the court suggest Stephan instructed Ali how to eliminate a "civilian".
The defendant claimed mistranslation of police recordings of his conversations with Ali in Arabic, claiming he told Ali to aim the gun at the bag rather than the head, which claim the court-appointed translator denied.
The translated transcriptions also suggest that the pair talked about Ali riding a bike to the spot where he was supposed to kill Plavec and committing the act in rain and using a silencer.
At one point Ali was heard expressing concern whether he would get paid for the job, with Stephan assuring him not to worry because this "would not be the first time". He later added that he had not done yet something like that in Slovenia.
The pair were arrested the last time they were returning from the woods. Ali later told the court via a video link that realising he was an informant, Stephen told him they would meet again, which Ali understood as a threat.
Another witness, Alen Kraljević, a fellow prisoner of Stephan while in custody, told the court in January that Stephan had been looking for a person to murder Ali, which Stephan denied as an outright lie.
In her closing arguments on Monday, prosecutor Vugrinec said the defendant's guilt resulted from the fact that he had handed Plavec's picture to Ali, told him his home address, how to reach him and how to get away.
She alleged that Stephan also got him a gun, took him to the woods to practice shooting and gave him EUR 5,000 out of the EUR 25,000 promised as the payment for the act.
The prosecutor argued that Stephan had intentionally tried to use Ali in his vulnerable position as an asylum seeker with several children and in need of money.
Stephan allegedly also knew that Ali was a former member of the Iraqi army, something that was testified by Kraljević, a fellow prisoner.
The prosecution proposes deporting Stephen, a French citizen, and imposing a five-year ban on his re-entering the country, arguing his posing a serious threat to public peace and order.
Stephan's defence counsel Gorazd Fišer argued his client's innocence, questioning the prosecution's interpretation of the evidence presented.
He suggested that Ali, having turned himself to the police, instigated Stephan to criminal acts, and that Ali's motive could be related to his asylum application, while arguing his client had no motive.
Fišer labelled Kraljević an untrustworthy witness, because he had already been convicted and was subject of another criminal procedure for fraud and false criminal complaints.
Fišer described his client as a man who dedicated his life to chemical science, arguing there was no evidence had had threatened anyone and also had never had problems breaking the law.
In his closing, Stephan said that he and Plavec got along well and that they often went out for dinner or coffee. He repeated his claim that the recordings of his conversations with Ali were mistranslated and some had been rigged.
He said it was Ali rather than himself who wanted to arrange for Plavec's killing, while he said the money he gave him was not an advance payment but rather aid for his children.
