BUDAPEST, July 30 (Xinhua) -- The Budapest prosecutor's office charged former president of the Hungarian swimming federation Tamas Gyarfas with ordering the murder in 1998 of his media business rival, Janos Fenyo, according to official sources here on Tuesday.
"The Budapest Chief Public Prosecutor's Office charged Tamas Gyarfas with incitement to a premeditated murder," the prosecutor's office declared here in a statement.
"According to the indictment, the accused was an important Hungarian media entrepreneur in the 1990s, as was Janos Fenyo," the statement added.
"From the mid-1990s, a trade dispute, a struggle for power and, as a result, an intense personal conflict developed between the accused and the victim," according to the statement.
The prosecution developed: "In 1997, the accused decided to kill the victim to put an end to the conflicts. For this reason, in September 1997, he hired a well known mobster to kill Fenyo for the amount of 12 million forints, which, after receiving an advance of 6 million forints, did not execute the order. For this reason, the suspect has mandated Tamas P., whom he knew since 1994 to kill Janos Fenyo."
According to the prosecution, Tamas P. accepted the order and persuaded J.R. - already convicted for this murder - to kill the victim.
J.R. killed the victim sitting in his car at a red light with a machine gun in the late afternoon of Feb. 11, 1998 in the 2nd district of Budapest.
The Budapest Chief Prosecutor's Office filed a complaint against Tamas Gyarfas for incitement to premeditated murder, the statement concluded.
Besides being the president of the Hungarian swimming federation from 1993 and 2016, Gyarfas had also been the owner of leftist news television Nap-TV from the beginning of the 1990s to 2009.
Local media reported that "rock-hard evidence, such as voice records" was backing up the case.
According to a statement issued earlier by the Hungarian police, the investigation of the murder was re-opened late October 2017 to find out who ordered the killing.
The original investigation stalled until 2010, when DNA evidence led police to arrest J.R., a Slovak citizen who was later sentenced to life in prison for the Fenyo murder and a bombing in Budapest's Aranykez street, also in 1998, which claimed four lives.
In 2017, further evidence led investigators to reopen the investigation. Gyarfas, was detained and questioned as a suspect in April 2018. Tamas P., currently serving a 13-year prison term for his role in the Fenyo murder and other crimes, was also questioned in the investigation.
