2022 Bratislava LGBTQ+ Bar Shooting

On October 12, 2022, Juraj Krajčík (19) drove to Tepláreň, an LGBTQ+ bar in Bratislava's Old Town district, and opened fire on its entrance area, killing Matúš Horváth and Juraj Vankulič (Vankulič was non-binary) and wounding Radka Trokšiarová. He fled the scene and died by suicide the following morning. Slovak police recovered his manifesto, which cited Terrorgram Collective co-founder Pavol Beňadik by his alias "Slovakbro" as a direct mentor, and Payton Gendron (the May 2022 Buffalo supermarket shooter) as his "final nudge" to act. The Bratislava attack was the first event formally attributed to Terrorgram's radicalization infrastructure and was immediately designated within the network as a "saint" event - the first in the Terrorgram saints canon.¹

The Attack

Krajčík drove to Tepláreň on the evening of October 12, 2022, a Wednesday. He fired at the bar's exterior area and entrance, killing Horváth and Vankulič outside the bar. Trokšiarová was wounded. He then fled. Slovak police located his body in a Bratislava park the following morning; he had died by suicide. The attack lasted a matter of minutes.

Beňadik had been arrested by Slovak authorities in May 2022, five months before the attack, but the years of prior mentorship he had provided Krajčík were not interrupted by that arrest. Krajčík had been in Beňadik's Telegram channels from approximately August 2019, when he was 15 or 16 years old. By October 2022 the radicalization pipeline was complete.²

Manifesto and Terrorgram Connection

Krajčík's manifesto, recovered by Slovak police, detailed his ideological development and named his influencers. He cited Beňadik by alias as a direct mentor. He identified Gendron as his "final nudge," indicating the Buffalo attack, which had occurred five months earlier in May 2022, provided the immediate operational trigger. Beňadik's Terrorgram channels had explicitly called for Slovak "saints" to emerge in the saint tradition founded by Brenton Tarrant's 2019 Christchurch attack.

The manifesto's framing placed the attack squarely within the Terrorgram ideological framework: the attacker as a soldier in an ongoing campaign of acceleration, the attack as a contribution to a chain of violence intended to hasten societal collapse, and the shooter as a willing martyr whose death would be celebrated within the network.¹

Terrorgram Attribution and "First Saint" Designation

Within Terrorgram channels, Krajčík was elevated to "saint" status immediately following the attack. Trading-card-style saint graphics were produced and circulated through Terrorgram's Telegram infrastructure, adding Krajčík to the canon of figures whose example the network presented as worthy of emulation. Researchers at the RSIS and CTC West Point subsequently identified the Bratislava attack as the first mass-casualty event directly attributable to Terrorgram's operational mentorship structure.

The Terrorgram Collective Canada designation (December 10, 2025) and the Matthew Althorpe Canadian sentencing proceeding (March 27, 2026) both identified the Bratislava attack as one of at least six attributed to the network's propaganda and mentorship activities. Justice Jane Kelly, sentencing Althorpe, found a direct connection between his publications and Krajčík's radicalization.³

Prosecution Outcomes

Because Krajčík died by suicide, he faced no prosecution. His attack fed directly into the proceedings against Beňadik, who had been arrested before the attack but whose channels had provided the years of mentorship Krajčík drew on. Slovak prosecutors cited the Bratislava attack explicitly in Beňadik's trial; he was convicted and sentenced to six years in prison for inciting the overthrow of the democratic constitutional system and for acts of terrorism.