Slovakian Prime Minister Robert Fico shot and gravely injured

Slovakia’s outgoing president, Zuzana Caputova, said police detained the alleged shooter.

“An attack on the prime minister is first and foremost an attack on a human being. But it’s also an attack on democracy,” she said. She urged people to refrain from “hasty judgments” before more information is known.

President-elect Peter Pellegrini, who takes power next month, said the attack represented “a threat to everything that up till now adorned Slovak democracy.”

“If we express different political opinions with guns in the squares, and not in polling stations, we endanger everything we have built together in 31 years of Slovak sovereignty,” he said.

The lack of information about the shooter’s motives did not stop Fico allies from casting blame.

“This assassination attempt was politically motivated, and the motivation was born immediately after the elections,” Interior Minister Matus Sutaj Estok said at the hospital.

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