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News server Romea.cz. Everything about Roma in one place

Czech Police apprehend perpetrators of hate crime in Bystřice pod Hostýnem

20 November 2013
2 minute read

Police have apprehended and charged two violent offenders who brutally assaulted fellow customers in a bar in the town of Bystřice pod Hostýnem this summer. News server Romea.cz previously reported on the case in great detail (see http://www.romea.cz/en/news/czech/czech-republic-brutal-assault-began-with-words-why-are-you-talking-to-a-gypsy).

One of the victims was hospitalized after the attack with a concussion and eventually underwent two eye operations. Both of the suspects apprehended have confessed and have been charged with grievous bodily harm and conspiracy to commit rioting.  

If convicted, the suspects face up to 10 years in prison. The aggressive assault happened in the Las Vegas bar at about 1 AM in the morning in July. 

The evening began normally enough for Marcel Kolařík and Josef Utěkal, two friends who were having a beer at the bar. A verbal skirmish with two other men then escalated into physical aggression against Kolařík, and when Utěkal stood up for him, he himself was then brutally attacked.

"They assaulted me first. They asked me why I was talking with a Gypsy, so I said he wasn’t a Gypsy," Marcel Kolařík described the start of the conflict.

When Utěkal, a resident of Bystřice, stood up for Kolařík, the aggressors turned on him with merciless brutality. "I was on the ground and the one guy ran up and kicked me in the eye with his heel. He kept striking me in that same eye and I don’t know what happened next," Utěkal described.

The assailants were not recognizable as locals to Utěkal, who said he had never seen them before in his life. Kolařík described coming to his aid as follows: "When I sat him up a bit, there was a pool of blood twice my size underneath him."

From the CCTV footage of the incident it is clear this was no ordinary brawl. One of the attackers seems to be out of his senses and repeatedly punches Utěkal long after he is unconscious on the ground.

Utěkal came to in the hospital. In addition to a serious concussion, he has also suffered serous injury to his left eye.

To this day he is suffering from severe headaches. He has undergone two eye operations already and evidently will bear scars from this attack for the rest of his life.

"They gave me skin grafts. One side is still dead," Utěkal said last month.

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