PRAGUE: Czech police said Wednesday they would review the death of former pro-western Czechoslovak foreign minister Jan Masaryk after a 1948 communist coup.
The body of Masaryk 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.
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.
The current review is "motivated by the discovery of new diplomatic and intelligence records" from the United States, Britain and France, police said on its website.
"Our goal is to compare this new information with the facts we have and unveil potential new circumstances that could bring answers to some long-unanswered questions," it added.
The office for the documentation and the investigation of the crimes of communism, a unit of Czech police, is investigating the case as a suspected murder.
But historian Petr Blazek told AFP police faced an uphill task.
"It will be tough. All witnesses are dead," said Blazek, who heads the Prague-based twentieth century memorial museum.
He said Masaryk had a reason to commit suicide, seeing many of his colleagues ousted from the ministry and the Soviet-steered government taking power.
But there were also "reasons for the communists and the Soviets to get rid of him," Blazek said.
"The new documents are valuable but we don't know if there's a new testimony," he added.
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.
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