Czech police on Wednesday started exhuming the remains of former pro-Western Czechoslovak foreign minister Jan Masaryk, who died under suspicious circumstances shortly after a 1948 communist coup, they said. Masaryk’s body was found on March 10, 1948 under the window of his official apartment and the authorities shelved the case as a suicide, but questions have remained. The Office for the Documentation and the Investigation of the Crimes of Communism, a unit of Czech police, is now investigating the case as a suspected murder. Police said on X they had started exhuming the body at a cemetery near the presidential summer residence of Lany, west of Prague early on Wednesday. “We believe this will help us clarify the circumstances behind the death of Jan Masaryk,” said police. Police spokesman Jakub Vincalek told AFP that police would try to complete the examination of the body “as fast as possible” but declined to give details. Police have reviewed the case several times since the communist government was toppled in the Velvet Revolution of 1989, four years before Czechoslovakia split peacefully into the Czech Republic and Slovakia. They announced they would review Masaryk’s death in early 2025, following the discovery of new diplomatic and intelligence records from the United States, Britain and France. Masaryk, the son of Czechoslovakia’s first president Tomas Garrigue Masaryk, was foreign minister in the Czechoslovak exile government in London during World War II and kept the job after the war. He declined to join mass resignations of non-communist ministers that paved the way to power for the Moscow-backed government in February 1948.
