Czech court sentences two of the four brawlers in Duchcov incident

A court in Teplice issued its ruling on 28 January in the case of those involved in an illegal manhunt for the organizer of anti-Romani demonstrations in the town of Duchcov, a group of four who ended up assaulting two mistakenly identified men. The judge has sentenced two of the defendants to prison, put one on probation, and acquitted the fourth. 

News server iDNES.cz reports that prosecutors did not succeed in proving who exactly committed one of the attacks. The four perpetrators of the attacks, who are Romani, set out on 13 July 2013 to look for one of the conveners of the first anti-Romani demonstration in Duchcov, Jindřich Svoboda. 

The group was led by David Bledy, the father of two of the defendants in the infamous May 2013 attack on a married couple in Duchcov; the trial in that case will begin on 18 February. At the time, Bledy was angry that the court had suddenly remanded his sons into custody even though several weeks had passed since the May incident. 

Bledy considered that decision to be a consequence of the anti-Romani sentiment that he believed Svoboda had revived in the town. Between 10 and 11 PM on 13 July 2013, he and his cousin Ladislav Feri and the brothers Jaroslav and Radoslav Ferko left a pub and set out to look for Svoboda at his home or on the streets. 

The Romani men told the court they had just intended to speak with Svoboda. However, on Teplická Street, the drunken quartet ultimately beat up another man who had left the U Svatýho pub just before midnight. 

"I was walking home. A few meters away from my building, someone tripped me from behind and before I could get up I got another blow from the front," the victim told the court.

The defendants either gave no testimony at all or denied everything. "I saw the gentlemen run, trip, and fall to the ground," Jaroslav Ferko claimed. 

Ladislav Feri stated that the man had shouted racist insults at the Roma and assaulted Bledy before they beat him up. "He was kneeling or lying on [Bledy]," Feri said. 

The court ultimately stated that it had succeeded in proving that Bledy and Feri had attacked the man. The Ferko brothers have escaped conviction in this particular case.

As for the second attack committed by the quartet, the prosecution did not succeed in proving who exactly beat the victim up, and therefore no one will be punished for committing that assault. "One of you struck the blow, but the court cannot determine which one of you it was," Judge Malchus told the defendants. 

In that incident, about 30 Romani people had gathered around a pub and began pushing their way inside. "They were banging on the doors and windows. They were shouting ‘White swine, we’ll kill you’," the pub manager told the court. 

"We wanted to go for a beer there. We yelled at them that they are racists because they didn’t want to let us in," Ladislav Feri told the court.

Punishments, therefore, have ultimately de facto been handed down only for the beating of the first man and, in Bledy’s case, for an assault on a police officer. Bledy got 20 months in prison and his cousin Feri, given his own criminal past, 16 months.

Both are still waiting to decide whether to appeal, as is the prosecutor with respect to all four defendants. The Ferko brothers have given up their right to appeal; nothing about their role in the illegal manhunt could be proven. 

Jaroslav Ferko has been acquitted. Radoslav has been put on 10 month’s probation because the court also reviewed a previous crime of his in which he shouted racist abuse at a nurse in a doctor’s waiting room.