Czech Police charge two men for publishing racist content about mass killing last year, Pirate Party and ROMEA filed reports against them

Racist commentaries were posted beneath a news item on mainstream news server Novinky.cz on 8 August 2020 about a tragic incident in Bohumín, Czech Republic, where 11 people, three of them children, died as the result of arson committed on the 11th floor of an apartment building. The Czech Police have charged two men with making racist remarks in association with last year’s tragic arson in Bohumín. Czech MP Olga Richterová (Pirates) and the ROMEA organization had jointly filed a criminal report against them.  Officers in Prague have charged a 43-year-old man there with posting racist comments online about the incident. After arson was committed inside an apartment building on 8 August 2020, 11 people died, including several children. Eva Kropáčová, spokesperson for the police in Prague, said the accused man produced and then posted a comment that was of a hateful, racist character about the people living in the apartment that had been attacked. Detectives charged the man with defamation of an ethnic, national, racial or other group and with approving of a felony. If convicted, the man from Prague could spend as long as three years in prson. A 41-year-old man from Ostrava has also been charged for authoring a racist article about the incident. Even though the vice-mayor of Bohumín, Igor Bruzl (Czech Social Democratic Party – ČSSD) announced to the public that neither the deceased nor the perpetrator had been members of a minority community, the Ostrava-based author referred to the dead in his article as “cikáni”. The piece was published on the right-wing extremist “Vlastenecké noviny” (“Patriotic News”) portal with the headline “Eleven fewer cikáni. Some of it burned up and some of it jumped out of the window”, describing the children who were victims of the attack as “a cikánská brood” and citizens of Romani origin as “an overpopulation of parasites”.   The author also used the phrase “barbecue of cikáni” to refer to the attack. The operator of the portal is an association headed by a Radek Velička.   Crime reports The analytical team of the Pirate Party, in collaboration with the ROMEA organization, mapped the most brutal, insidious comments posted online in the aftermath of the mass killing. Richterová and ROMEA then sent those articles and comments to police as part of their joint crime report against the unidentified perpetrators.

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