The mysterious death of a UN adviser in Prague. He disappeared from a hotel full of spies, the revelation was made by the river

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Charity worker and UN refugee adviser Charles Jordan disappeared from the Esplanade Hotel, where he was staying, on August 16, 1967, two hours before midnight, without any of the staff including the receptionists noticing. Perhaps he left through some side entrance, which is rather strange. His trail ends at the hotel in Jindřišská street, where he went to buy an American newspaper. His body was found four days later by a fisherman one and a half kilometers away in the Vltava.

Josef Frolík, a member of the communist State Security, who fled to the West in 1969, later described how four men pounced on Jordan not far from the hotel and put him in a parked car that belonged to a diplomat from the Egyptian embassy. At the same time, eleven informants of the Czechoslovak counter-intelligence armed with pistols and submachine guns were allegedly watching the action from hiding. The fact that the Arab commando intended to eliminate Jordan already in Bucharest was allegedly alerted by the Soviet KGB slightly in advance.

State security could have easily thwarted the kidnapping, but according to Frolík, they did not intervene because they did not want to disrupt the strengthening Czechoslovak-Arab relations, i.e. endanger the arms supplies that flowed from us to the east after the Six-Day War. However, this testimony of a communist spy has some cracks.

The official police investigation into the death of Charles Jordan dragged on for months, but still failed to find any conclusive evidence or testimony. In mid-December, the investigators were disturbed by the news that Professor Ernest Hardmeyer from the Institute of Forensic Medicine of the University of Zurich, who had performed an autopsy on Jordan’s corpse at the request of the American Embassy, ​​died under strange circumstances near Zurich. A Swiss doctor was found frozen in a forest ten meters from his undamaged car. And the Czech police saw similar features in the deaths of Hardmeyer and Charles Jordan…

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Podcast Aktuálně.cz Strange Crimes describes the circumstances of mysterious or unusual criminal cases from the time of communist rule in Czechoslovakia. Based on period investigative files and other documents from the police archives, it presents strangeness in the investigation, obscured testimonies, ambiguities and new details of the crimes.