Jan Sokol (2020): it would be 'an exaggeration' to say the StB killed Patočka — interrogations 'maybe accelerated' a death the regime itself reportedly regretted

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In a 2020 Radio Prague International interview, Jan Sokol — Jan Patočka's son-in-law — gave a more qualified account of the StB's role in Patočka's death than the vault's existing framing: "I think that the aim of the StB was not to kill him. And it would be an exaggeration to say that they killed him. He was a little bit ill in '77 and the long interrogations only maybe accelerated his death. I think that the StB, or at least the Communist leadership, was not happy that Patočka died." Asked why the leadership would be unhappy, Sokol said it was "bad publicity for them, internationally," adding that his own family was consequently "somehow protected" afterward — he was never imprisoned, though he underwent "normal interrogations."

This complicates, rather than contradicts, the vault's existing record that Patočka died after StB interrogation: the same eyewitness who elsewhere describes the interrogation sequence in detail (see claim-patocka-interrogated-after-van-der-stoel-meeting-died-two-weeks-later) resists the flatter causal claim that the StB killed him outright.