Jan Masaryk’s grave opened after 78 years as police revisit possible murder

Nearly 80 years after Jan Masaryk was found dead beneath the window of his official residence in Prague, Czech investigators are opening the former foreign minister’s grave and returning to the question that never went away: was he murdered?

Police began exhuming Masaryk’s remains from the family grave in Lány, near Prague. The remains will undergo modern forensic and criminal examination in an effort to clarify the circumstances of his death. Police spokesman Jakub Vinčálek said investigators would use the latest available methods and examine the remains as soon as possible.

Officials recorded Masaryk’s death as suicide after finding him dead on March 10, 1948, below a window at Černín Palace. But the manner of his death, combined with the political conditions of the time, left persistent doubts. Masaryk died only weeks after communists seized power in Czechoslovakia in February 1948.

The police Office for the Documentation and Investigation of the Crimes of Communism reopened the case last year and is examining the possibility that Masaryk was killed. Newly obtained diplomatic and intelligence documents from archives in the United States, Britain and France reportedly contain previously unknown details about the circumstances surrounding his death. Investigators hope the evidence will help test the competing claims that have formed around the case over the decades.

The file has been reopened several times since the 1989 Velvet Revolution ended communist rule in Czechoslovakia, but no definitive conclusion has established how Masaryk died. The son of Tomas Garrigue Masaryk, the country’s first president and one of its founders, Jan Masaryk served as foreign minister in the Czechoslovak government-in-exile in London during World War II and remained in the post after the war. He supported close ties with the West and did not join the non-communist ministers who resigned during the February 1948 political crisis. His death soon after the Moscow-backed communists took power remains one of the most disputed political cases in Czechoslovak history.

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The remains will be examined as soon as possible using the latest criminal investigation methods.