Czech Police complete investigation of racist arson attack on a Romani family in Býchory

Police have completed their investigation into a racist attack perpetrated against a Romani family in Býchory (Kolín district) earlier this year. Four youths suspected of attempting to set fire to the Romani family’s apartment will be prosecuted in the near future.

“The charges of a racially motivated attack remain in the motion to prosecute,” Michal Mazánek, chief detective in the Central Bohemian Region, told the Mediafax agency. The four face prosecution for conspiring and attempting the felony crimes of committing violence against members of a particular group and grievous bodily harm.

The four youths suspected are from Býchory and neighboring villages and are in their early twenties. Since the initial charges against them were reduced, they were not remanded into custody.

The youths are suspected of throwing a flaming torch through the window of a Romani family’s first-floor apartment in Býchory at the start of July. Before throwing it from the street, they loudly chanted “Bohemia for the Czechs” and other slogans with racial subtexts. The fire was put out in time and no one was injured.

Some media have reported that the torch was put out by the eight-year-old son of the victimized family (who is actually nine years old). News server Romea.cz has refuted those claims. The torch was put out by an adult, a friend of the family who was visiting and watching television in the room where the torch landed.

The youths face prison sentences of between three and 12 years because they committed the crime together. The longest sentence may be handed down to the youngest member of the group, who is 21.

A similar case occurred in August in the town of Krty (Rakovník district). A still-unidentified perpetrator attacked a Romani family there in the early morning hours of Wednesday, 10 August. A Molotov cocktail flew through the window of the small home at the train station where the family lives, landing next to a cot where a one-year-old child was sleeping. The parents were in the room at the time. The father succeeded in putting out the flaming bottle but burned his foot in the process. Mediafax reports that police and residents of the village said no one had ever had any problems with the victimized family.

The most famous racially motivated attack against Romani victims in recent years remains the case from April 2009 in which four right-wing extremists threw three Molotov cocktails into a small house in Vítkov (Opava district). During the subsequent blaze three people were injured. An infant who was not quite two years old at the time suffered the worst injuries. This past March a court sent the perpetrators to serve sentences of 20 and 22 years in prison.

Not quite one year after the Vítkov case, a similar attack was committed against the home of a Romani family in the Bedřiška settlement of Ostrava. In that case, however, the court ruled that the motivation had not been racism, but disputes between neighbors. The juvenile perpetrator of that attack was sent to prison for four years by the court this past March, while his mother got 7.5 years for instructing him to commit reckless endangerment.