The night the lights went out at Tepláreň — a small, familiar gay bar tucked into the old town of Bratislava — the city lost more than two young lives. It lost, briefly and shockingly, the pretence that such violence could not happen here. What followed was a slow unravelling: grief, anger, and the uneasy realisation that a local act of brutality had been braided into a wider, transnational story of online radicalisation and ideological contagion.
Pictured are police officers after a shooting on Zamocka Street in Bratislava on October 12, 2022, that left two dead. PHOTO TASR – Jaroslav NovákYou can simply scroll past—but please don't overlook the importance of an independent queer press.
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You can simply scroll past — but please don’t overlook the importance of an independent queer press.
You can simply scroll past—but please don't overlook the importance of an independent queer press.
Time is now or never.
Queer voices disappear without independent journalism to amplify them.
We document what others won't touch.
We hold power to account when it threatens our communities.
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On 12 October 2022, a 19-year-old, Juraj Krajčík, walked from a nearby alcove to the bench outside Tepláreň and fired several shots from a .45-calibre handgun. He killed two people — the bartender Matúš Horváth, a university student who had recently arrived in Bratislava to study Chinese, and Juraj Vankulič, a visual merchandiser — and wounded a woman. Witnesses said the gunman had waited, watching, for at least half an hour before opening fire; he fled and was found dead the next morning of a self-inflicted wound. The weapon, legally owned by his father, would become a grim symbol of questions that would not easily go away: about access, culpability and the failure of earlier warnings.
The attack sent shockwaves through Slovakia, a conservative radical EU country where the Roman Catholic Church wields considerable influence and same-sex partnerships remain unrecognised by law. Recently, on 26 September 2025, Slovakia’s parliament passed a sweeping amendment to the Constitution that enshrines a new legal framework for national identity and redefines several rights — especially those affecting LGBT+ people. The constitutional change now mandates that only two sexes — male and female — are legally recognised, limits gender transition to “serious reasons” under law, reserves adoption of children almost exclusively for married couples, bans surrogacy, and gives the state sovereignty over “cultural and ethical issues” which could override certain obligations under EU law.
Between fifteen thousand and twenty thousand people marched through Bratislava two days later after the attack to condemn hatred against the LGBT community. Zuzana Čaputová, president at the time, walked at the front of the procession, later apologising to the victims’ families from the stage. “I’m sorry that we were not able to protect your loved ones,” she told the crowd. “You belong here; you are valuable for our society.”
But beyond Slovakia’s borders, the shooting attracted little attention. The death toll seemed low, the motive appeared local, and the perpetrator was presumed to be a deranged lone actor. In fact, as investigations over the past three years have revealed, Krajčík was part of something far more sinister: a globalised network of far-right extremists who inspire, encourage, and possibly even direct one another towards violence across continents.
Krajčík grew up in Bratislava’s affluent Kramáre district, a quiet young man who neither smoked nor drank. He attended an elite private school and spent weekends with his family. Though known for angry outbursts, he gave no indication of extremist views. His father was a minor figure in the defunct far-right Vlasť (Homeland) party, which had deployed anti-LGBT rhetoric before the 2020 parliamentary elections, describing sexual minorities as “sick” and “perverted”. But there is no evidence that Krajčík’s family knew of his radicalisation or his plans. Although he used his father gun.
What has been revealed since — in court records, in police files and in the work of investigative journalists — is a portrait not simply of a lone, disturbed youth but of a boy steeped in a global, poisonous narrative. In the hours before the attack K. posted a manifesto online that drew on the “great replacement” conspiracy and white-supremacist rhetoric; he named political leaders as alternative targets and echoed the language of killers elsewhere. Analysts who have examined the text and his social media activity see fingerprints that are not purely local. Forensic linguists and extremism researchers suggested the document bore stylistic inconsistencies and a fluency that implied outside influence — perhaps even a second author of greater experience — while experts traced Krajčík’s rhetoric to an online ecosystem that has normalised and amplified violence.
The catalyst appears to have come from abroad. When Krajčík joined Twitter in April 2021, he immediately began expressing extreme racist ideas with little relevance to life in Bratislava. “American culture is centred around n,” he wrote, deploying a racial slur. “They killed hundreds of thousands of white men to free n. They listen to n music.” More locally focused invective targeting Jewish, LGBT, and Roma communities followed, but a persistent transatlantic influence remained evident.
Krajčík was not alone in his online radicalisation. At the same time, Daniel Harris, a troubled teenager in Glossop, England, was uploading videos and blog posts praising far-right mass murderers and calling for armed uprising. Between February 2021 and March 2022, Harris posted five videos, including one focused on Brenton Tarrant, who killed fifty-one people at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, in March 2019. A viewer commented: “This video has moved me. I was on the fence—now I am committed to my race.” Among those who posted encouragement was an eighteen-year-old in Conklin, New York, named Payton Gendron.
In May, 2022, Gendron drove for three hours and shot dead ten Black people in a supermarket in Buffalo. His manifesto used an image posted by Harris, who was arrested by British police within forty-eight hours of the killing. For far-right extremists online, Gendron’s attack provoked feverish excitement. In Bratislava, Krajčík wrote that it was “the final nail in the coffin” that “gave new inspiration, a new impulse to do what had to be done after years of procrastination”.
These online communities have enabled the rapid spread of the “great replacement” conspiracy theory—a set of paranoid lies claiming that white people are being overwhelmed by the demographic rise of other communities. Many adherents falsely believe that feminism undermines birth rates of the “white race”, and that progressive efforts to fight homophobic prejudice are part of a similar plan. Such falsehoods inspired not only the Christchurch attack but many of the most horrifying recent acts of white-supremacist violence in the United States.
The most extreme adherents practise what is known as accelerationism: using violence to speed what they believe is the inevitable collapse of “corrupt and decadent” democratic societies. This strategy thrives on anonymous, almost entirely unmoderated social media such as Telegram’s Terrorgram channels and the 8chan message board, where users exchange texts and videos, indulge in hate-filled commentary, and mock those unwilling to take action themselves.
“The notion of a distinction between online and the ‘real world’ has long gone,” Meghan Conroy, a research fellow with the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, said. Alejandra Ruvinsky, a senior analyst at CST, a charity that protects British Jews from antisemitism, added: “This is absolutely global. An attack in Bratislava doesn’t mean there is a critical mass of neo-Nazis in Slovakia. It means there is a critical mass of neo-Nazis around the world.”
Not long before his attack, Krajčík posted a sixty-five-page manifesto to anonymous file-sharing sites. Similar to those uploaded by Gendron and other far-right attackers, it outlined the toxic influence of the “great replacement” conspiracy theory. But its opening line identified his principal enemy, which was not the LGBT community: “It’s the jews, it’s the jews, it’s the jews.”
Extreme-right conspiracy theories often accuse Jewish people of promoting LGBT rights in order to destroy the nuclear family and lower white birth rates. “It’s not just Jewish communities which are victims of antisemitism,” Hannah Rose, of the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, said. “For a lot of shooters, attacking an LGBT bar is also a means of attacking Jewish people. So the threat to one community becomes a danger to many others.”
Krajčík’s manifesto falsely claimed the world was run by “Zionist Occupied Government” and provided a lengthy list of targets ranging from politicians and journalists to “invasive non-Whites”. Joe Mulhall, the director of research at Hope Not Hate, said: “One of the things that is so dangerous about conspirational antisemitism is that it can be used to justify almost any action. Whatever the target, the core of the ideology seems to be antisemitism.”
But the most troubling discovery came when Julia Kupper, a forensic linguist specialising in targeted violence, analysed Krajčík’s writings. She found stylistic inconsistencies—varying date formats, spellings, and the repeated use of idioms or vocabulary suggesting an author possibly in his forties or fifties and based in the United States. “There are explicit references that demonstrate an almost unprecedented understanding of the accelerationist scene,” Kupper said. “It appears unlikely that Krajčík would have gained that level of familiarity in such a short time.”
Kupper concluded: “We suspect there was a second author who took on a ‘command and control’ role from around May 2022, but we don’t know who this was or where.” Slovakian officials who have studied local extremism confirmed the stylistic mismatch and said the idea of a second author was “very plausible”.
If a more experienced activist did influence Krajčík directly, a new form of militant far-right activism may be emerging. “This would be an evolution of the Terrorgram community away from just incitement towards something much more organised in terms of instigating and preparing violence,” Kupper said. “And this is frightening.”
Three years on, the threat persists. In November 2023, police launched an international operation against far-right terrorism in Belgium, Croatia, Germany, Lithuania, Romania, and Italy, arresting five people suspected of recruitment and online propaganda. A recent Europol report noted that “the threat from right-wing terrorist lone actors, radicalised online, remains significant”.
In Bratislava, the LGBT community continues to live in fear. According to European Union data, seventy-seven per cent of homosexual couples in Slovakia are always or often afraid of holding hands in public. One in five trans and intersex people reported being physically or sexually attacked in the five years leading up to the survey. Slovakia remains one of the few EU member states that does not legally recognise same-sex partnerships.
At Tepláreň, owner Roman Samotný told the crowd at the October 2022 march: “Many say LGBT people are an ideology. But I saw the blood of my friends on the pavement. I saw their shot bodies, no ideology.” The bar, he said in an interview, was “a refuge for many young people who are looking for solid ground under their feet. They fail to find it elsewhere, because this country is not favourable to them.”
President Čaputová’s Presidential Palace flew the rainbow flag in solidarity after the attack, but her role is symbolic; she lacks executive power to change laws. Despite initial promises from parliamentary parties to support life partnerships for same-sex couples, little has materialised. The October evening that claimed Matúš Horváth and Juraj Vankulič was warm and sunny. Today, dozens of candles and flowers still appear outside Tepláreň, a reminder of lives cut short and a society still grappling with hatred that, as investigations have shown, reaches far beyond Slovakia’s borders.
Survivors and comrades of the dead — and the wider civil-society network that rallies around them — have demanded more than condolences. They want sustained investment in prevention, better moderation of extremist content online, legal protections for minorities and, crucially, political rhetoric that does not otherise. The evidence assembled since the shooting suggests an urgent policy that is less about reactive gestures and more about building social resilience: education in the face of conspiracy, targeted interventions for vulnerable youth, and cross-border co-operation against networks that traffic in terror.
Three years on, Tepláreň still stands, its windows scrubbed, its stools returned to their place. Candles and flowers do not make policy. They are, however, a reminder that behind the statistics and the manifestos are ordinary lives — people who liked K-pop, who studied languages, who joked behind the bar. The lesson of Bratislava is both immediate and unsettling: in an era when violent ideologies can be cultivated at the speed of a share, the smallest town is perilously close to the global stage. The work of naming the danger has begun; the harder task — of dismantling the networks and the narratives that produce this violence — remains.
This article used different sources, including The Observer/The Guardian, Balkan Insight, Amnesty International, Reuters, PBS NewsHour, ConstitutionNet and Council of Europe / Venice Commission.
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