Marinko Magda is serving a life sentence in Hungary for killings committed in the winter of 1993 and 1994. A Hungarian court convicted him of the deaths of four people in two separate events, one in Kecskemét on December 19, 1993, and one in Orosháza on January 5, 1994. In Serbia, a court sentenced him to death in absentia for the killings of five people at Subotica and Palić in January 1994, a sentence later converted to 40 years in prison. A Hungarian court acquitted him, for lack of evidence, of the killing of four members of a family in Szeged.
Hungarian and Serbian newspapers have repeatedly put the total at 13 or 14 victims. That figure comes from police attribution and press summaries, not from any verdict. The courts of the two countries decided different cases, and each record stands on its own.
According to Telex, Magda was born in 1963 in Subotica, a city in the far north of Vojvodina that Hungarians call Szabadka, then part of Yugoslavia. The Hungarian outlet reported that he had run-ins with the police there and left the country at the age of 23. He joined the French Foreign Legion and served on several continents. He deserted in 1990, returned to Yugoslavia while the country was breaking up in war, and joined the paramilitary unit led by Željko Ražnatović, known as Arkan, whose men were called the Tigers. A former police investigator from Serbia, quoted by the Subotica site GradSubotica, described him as a man of above-average intelligence who had learned to survive in the Legion.
In 1993 he settled in Hungary, in Szeged, and became known in the city's nightlife, Telex reported. Serbian press accounts describe him as the leader of a group that moved between Serbia and Hungary.
A three-part Hungarian documentary series, "A kegyetlen: Magda Marinko rémtörténete" (The Cruel: The Horror Story of Marinko Magda), was made by Paprika Studios for the RTL+ Premium streaming service and first reported by 444 in November 2025. Telex, summarizing it in December 2025, said it drew on a former Hungarian intelligence officer who claimed that Magda's Legion service was an assignment and that his desertion was ordered, so that he could serve as a link between paramilitary groups and Serbian intelligence during the war. Hungarian intelligence assessments of the period, as Telex described them, treated the open question as how deep his Serbian ties went. Those assessments also suggested that he came to Hungary with a specific task, possibly connected to a smuggling network supplying Croatian forces.
Telex presented all of this as the claim of one interviewee and of the documentary, not as a confirmed record. No court in either country made a finding about any intelligence connection.
The first killings in the Hungarian verdict took place in Kecskemét on December 19, 1993. Telex, working from the case and the documentary, reported that Magda and Serbian companions went to Antal Horváth, a man he knew, and that Horváth handed over 800,000 forints. Horváth, his wife and a third man, a Croatian citizen named Dragutin Kujundžić, were killed. Serbian outlets, including Telegraf, date Kujundžić's death to December 20. The couple's eight-year-old son survived.
The Hungarian courts treated this as a triple killing. The February 2026 coverage of the sentence-enforcement ruling by HVG, Telex and Economx describes the Kecskemét case as a triple murder.
On January 5, 1994, a woman in Orosháza, Edit Némethné Márton, was killed. Her two daughters survived, Telex reported. Cash, watches and jewelry were taken. This is the fourth death in the Hungarian verdict, and the second separate event. The Hungarian press names her as Edit Némethné Márton; Serbian outlets give the name in several forms, among them Edita Nemet and Edita Orošhaza, and they all refer to the same woman and the same town.
The Serbian case concerns the night in January 1994 on which two households were attacked in and near Subotica. The Petrić family in Subotica, a married couple and their 10-year-old son Dane, were killed first. Later the same night, Josip and Verica Agatić were killed at Palić, the lakeside resort beside the city. Serbian outlets give the date variously as mid-January and as the night of January 23 to 24. Nova.rs and Novosti both say that police evidence tied the two addresses together and that a link to the Szeged killings followed from it.
Nova.rs reported that a co-defendant who was a minor at the time was held responsible for the boy's death. Kurir wrote that Magda claimed he had never killed a child. The courts and the press agree that the exact number of killings he personally carried out, as opposed to those in which he took part, was never established.
Telex reports that Magda admitted the Kecskemét, Orosháza and Vojvodina killings. He did not admit the Szeged case.
On January 23, 1994 (other reports say January 13), four members of one family were killed in Szeged: a father, a mother and two sons, aged 17 and 10 according to Telex (a Kurir report from 2019 gives the sons' ages as 10 and 16). Telex wrote that the father had business dealings with Josip Agatić, one of the victims at Palić, and that police linked the Szeged and Palić killings through the evidence.
Police suspected Magda. He denied any connection. A Budapest court acquitted him for lack of evidence, and on appeal the Supreme Court held that his guilt could not be proven, Economx reported in 2026. In law, therefore, he stands acquitted of these four deaths. Two other men were also tried in connection with the Z. Nagy case; Telex reported that one of them, János Dobnik, a former Legion member, was acquitted of it and received a lesser sentence in the other killings, and that the second man, identified only as Attila T., was acquitted. The Szeged killings have no convicted perpetrator, and Telex described the case, in December 2025, as still only partly answered.
Serbian outlets report that about four months after the January 1994 killings, an elderly woman, Ida Feher, was killed near Subotica. Kurir and Nova.rs say that police concluded Magda had killed her, alone or with others. The reports describe no trial or verdict for this death, and Magda is not reported to have admitted it. It is an attribution by the police.
Serbian reports agree on how the Subotica inquiry broke open. A member of the group, named in the press as Ivan Šinković, went to the police on his own, named Magda as the leader and described the other members. According to Nova.rs he also handed over physical evidence from the killings and was given a polygraph test; GradSubotica says police traced the item to a Croat who was later convicted of an unrelated trading offense, not of murder. Police said the forensic evidence was enough for their Hungarian counterparts to arrest Magda.
Police on both sides then compared the cases. The joint Serbian and Hungarian work, as Nova.rs and Novosti describe it, tied the Subotica and Palić killings, the Szeged killings and several others to the same group, which is the origin of the figures of 13 and 14 victims. Several members of the group were arrested in Hungary, according to GradSubotica.
Magda was living legally in Szeged when he was arrested in January 1994. Kurir gives the date as January 28. The version carried by the Serbian press and by Telex is that police, wary of a violent confrontation, asked him to come to a station about his residence permit. Telex added that he attacked an investigator during questioning. The documentary disputes this account: according to Telex, its research found that a criminal intelligence officer persuaded him, at a friend's home, to go to the police about a gold watch that had belonged to Horváth and had been traced to a dealer, and the friend said that Magda was preparing to leave the country and would have fled had he not gone.
The Hungarian case against Magda came to court in Budapest. Index reported in 2002 that prosecutors had charged him with eight murders in Hungary. The court convicted him on some of the counts and acquitted him of the Z. Nagy killings. A photograph caption quoted by Nova.rs places him at the Budapest municipal court on June 20, 1995.
Telex dates the conviction to October 6, 1995. Serbian outlets give "late 1995" and December 1995, and one names the judge as Zoltán Varga. The Supreme Court (Legfelsőbb Bíróság) heard the appeal. Economx and Index report that in 1996 it found him guilty of premeditated murder of several people, committed for profit and with particular cruelty, and of other offenses, and imposed life imprisonment in a penal institution (fegyház). The judgment is final. He has been serving the sentence since June 1, 1996, which is the date given by HVG and Economx. Telex noted that the sentence was not life imprisonment in the sense of the later Hungarian law, which did not yet exist in 1995.
HVG describes the convicted crimes as the killing of a woman in Orosháza and a triple killing in Kecskemét, committed in cold blood and with a high degree of organization, and it says they caused fear across the country. Telex wrote that he was convicted in part as a co-perpetrator.
Hungary's life terms imposed before 1998 carry a review: conditional release can be considered after a fixed period. Index wrote in 2002 that the earliest review would come after 25 years, and Index in 2005 reported that because he was sentenced before 1998, the sentence was generally treated as 25 to 30 years.
In Serbia, a court in Subotica tried Magda in absentia, because he was in Hungarian custody. Telegraf and Kurir say that he was tried together with 11 other defendants; Nova.rs and Novosti name seven co-defendants who were sentenced, and the list shows prison terms of 20 years for three men, 15 years for one, 13 years for one, 10 years for one and 9 years for one. The Subotica court is named in a 2006 report carried by Mondo; the reports do not give the date of the Serbian verdict. Kurir wrote in 2023 that it came roughly a year and a half before the Hungarian sentence, which would point to 1994, but that is an inference by the paper.
Magda was sentenced to death in absentia, Index (2005), Nova.rs, Novosti and Economx all report. The death sentence did not stand. Economx wrote that it was changed to 40 years after the death penalty was abolished. Kurir wrote in 2019 that Serbia abolished the death penalty in 2001 and that sentences were converted to life imprisonment with a minimum of 40 years. Mondo, in 2006, reported a different route to the same result: it said that the then president, Milan Milutinović, pardoned him and reduced the sentence to 40 years. The reports therefore disagree on the mechanism; they agree on 40 years.
One of the co-defendants who was a minor at the time was also sentenced to death, according to Nova.rs, and his sentence was replaced by 15 years after the law changed.
Serbia asked for Magda's extradition. Hungary refused, because he would have faced the death penalty. Telex, Index (2005) and Kurir record that refusal.
In 2002, Index reported that Magda himself asked to serve his sentence in his home country, and that the Hungarian Ministry of Justice had approached the Yugoslav side; a transfer convention had applied between the two states since August 1, 2002, and a transfer required his consent and an agreement between the states. Index added that he faced a pending trial in Yugoslavia and that the international tribunal in The Hague wanted to hear him in the Milošević case. Telegraf reported in 2018 that he had asked years earlier to be sent to Serbia to testify, saying he wanted the truth to come out. No transfer took place. Kurir reported in 2019 that a favorable parole decision in Hungary would not free him automatically, since Serbia would seek his extradition to serve its own sentence. Kurir reported in 2023 that a lawyer for Magda had applied, about two years earlier, to the Higher Court in Subotica for conditional release on the Serbian sentence, and that the court rejected the request.
Magda was held at the Sátoraljaújhely prison, which has a special security unit near the Hungarian border with Ukraine, and later at the Csillag prison in Szeged, where he was in a high-security unit with about ten other high-risk prisoners. In 2005 a court at Sátoraljaújhely found him guilty of violence against an official: Index reported that in the prison gym he had grabbed a guard by the shoulder strap and pulled him to the floor, which he described as a reflex. The sentence was a fine of 40,000 forints, which became final; if unpaid, it converts to 200 days in custody, and Index headlined that he could remain in prison 200 days longer.
Telex reported in December 2025 that he has attacked guards, tried to take his own life and once drew up a list of people he regarded as enemies, which included the arresting officer and a journalist. Prison staff, Kurir wrote in 2021, describe him as rule-abiding and sociable, while psychologists found no remorse. The one television interview with him, conducted in 1995 by the journalist Krisztina Máté, was included in the documentary, according to Telex; he declined to appear on camera for the series.
Economx reports that he became eligible for conditional release on March 24, 2019. The Szeged sentence-enforcement court refused in 2019, and again in the following years: Kurir wrote in April 2019 that a doctor found his mental state worse and that he was not ready for the outside world, and Novosti and Nova.rs reported refusals in February 2021, in his absence, and in February 2022. In the 2021 hearing, Novosti wrote, he declined a court-ordered psychiatric evaluation and did not attend, and the judge cited his difficulty accepting rules, lack of remorse and refusal to cooperate.
On February 11, 2026, the sentence-enforcement judge of the Szeged Regional Court (Szegedi Törvényszék) refused release for the seventh time. Telex, HVG and Economx reported the reasons. For years his conduct in prison had caused no problems, but he spoke with only a few people and refused to speak to the judge, the prosecutor or his own defense lawyer. He did not set out plans for life after release or say what he thought of his crimes, so the court could not conclude that he would live lawfully outside prison. HVG stressed that conditional release is a discretionary benefit and not an entitlement. He left the hearing before the ruling was announced. His lawyer filed an appeal, and the law requires a further review after one year. The reports do not give the outcome of the appeal.
Several claims about Magda have circulated for years without a verdict behind them.
The count of victims is the first. Serbian outlets say police attributed 13 or 14 killings to him, alone or with others, and some give the Hungarian share as eight and the Serbian as six. Hungarian prosecutors, according to Index in 2002, charged eight murders in Hungary; 444 wrote in 2025 that the Hungarian authorities proved four. Index in 2005 and some later Serbian reports speak of eight victims in the Serbian case, which does not match the five named victims at Subotica and Palić. These totals have not been reconciled.
The Z. Nagy case is the second. He was acquitted, and the case has no convicted perpetrator.
A killing of a family in Crvenka in December 1993 has been connected to him by one Subotica outlet, GradSubotica, which wrote that police believed he was responsible but that he never admitted it. It is a suspicion that no court has examined.
The intelligence-service claims, the third, come from interviewees in the documentary, and the series itself treats them as open questions.
Index in 2002 wrote that he had learned his methods at a training camp run by Arkan, and 444 described him in 2025 as a hired killer. These characterizations were made by commentators and were not findings of a court.
The case stayed in the public memory in both countries. The first Hungarian true crime series, "A kegyetlen," premiered on RTL+ Premium in late 2025, with a broadcast on Viasat3 to follow, 444 reported. In Serbia, the Nova S series "Kljun," set in the north of the country, renewed attention to the Subotica killings in 2021, Nova.rs wrote. Nova.rs also traced the later paths of several of the Serbian co-defendants: one, Šekarić, walked out of an open unit at the Sremska Mitrovica prison in 1997; another, Goran Stavrić, was released in 2003, re-sentenced in 2004 for robbery and escaped, and was killed in Lima, Peru, in 2014; and Siniša Petrić was arrested in Spain in 2012 and was extradited to Bosnia and Herzegovina to serve the rest of his sentence.
1963: Born in Subotica (Telex).
1990: Deserts from the French Foreign Legion (Telex).
1993: Settles in Szeged, Hungary (Telex).
December 19, 1993: Three people killed at Kecskemét (Hungarian verdict).
January 5, 1994: A woman killed at Orosháza (Hungarian verdict).
January 1994: Five people killed at Subotica and Palić (Serbian verdict; admitted).
January 23, 1994: Four members of the Z. Nagy family killed at Szeged (Magda acquitted).
Late January 1994: Arrested at Szeged.
About May 1994: Ida Feher killed near Subotica (attributed by police).
1995: Sentenced to life imprisonment in Hungary (October 6 according to Telex). Serbian court sentences him to death in absentia (date not reported).
1996: Supreme Court judgment, life imprisonment, final; serving since June 1, 1996.
2002: Asks to serve his sentence in his home country.
2005: Fined for violence against a guard.
March 24, 2019: Becomes eligible for conditional release; refused.
February 11, 2026: Release refused for the seventh time; appeal filed.