Czech Republic: Fake bombs found in Romani ghetto, locals are afraid

Two small packages resembling bombs have been found in the Romani ghetto of Machnín in the town of Liberec. While the packages did not contain any explosives, local residents say they are still significantly afraid of right-wing extremists. 

Romani residents of the apartment buildings in Machnín agree they are concerned that right-wing extremists will attempt to attack them. They have felt especially threatened since this past Tuesday, when the suspicious packages were discovered inside an apartment building before noon.

"A tenant found two suspicious packages in the hallway that seemed to be booby-trapped explosives," police spokesperson Vlasta Suchánková said. "They were little boxes made out of what looked like flashlights glued together with wires trailing out of them. They looked like bombs. We were afraid," Milan Gábor told a reporter for the Czech daily Mf DNES. He and his brother-in-law called the police.   

The discovery began a five-hour period of uncertainty during which police evacuated the entire building in which the packages had been found as well as the building next door. As many as 30 people had to leave their apartments.

Roads near the ghetto were blocked off. Police brought bomb-sniffing dogs and a pyrotechnician to the scene. 

"The technician determined these were not explosives, but dummies. He said they were actually high-speed throttle valves for a hydraulic manifold," Suchánková said.

Romani people in Machnín are frightened now. "We know what is going on now in České Budějovice and what the anti-Romani mood in this society is like, so naturally we are afraid," Gábor said.

Gábor said the community had previously experienced someone setting fire to basements and smashing the windows of buildings and cars in the neighborhood one night. "That was about two years ago, it’s been calm until now," he said, admitting that the packages could have been a kid’s prank and were not necessarily placed there by right-wing extremists. 

"In any event, these days we’re afraid of everything. I tend to believe this might have been done by someone who wanted to bully us, but definitely not by anyone local, we don’t have any problems with them," Gábor said.

Josef Pompa, another ghetto resident, is convinced the incident was a neo-Nazi warning that something even more serious could come to them. "God forbid it was a real bomb and the children touched it, " he said.  "We were enormously afraid, we weren’t expecting anything like this at all."

Police say the entire Machnín incident is now closed. "We can’t suspect anyone of either a felony or a misdemeanor offense here, so the officers have simply documented the incident," Suchánková said.

Attacks on Romani dwellings did occur in the Liberec Region during the 1990s. The two most famous incidents took place in the Jablonec area.

In 1994 one of the first racially motivated attacks in the independent Czech Republic took place in the Zelené Údolí quarter of Jablonec nad Nisou. A small group of skinheads threw Molotov cocktails into the apartment of a Romani family, causing serious burns to a 12-year-old girl and her mother.

The other incident took place five years later in the town of Plavy. Two Molotov cocktails were thrown by an unidentified arsonist through the window of another home into a room where a woman was sleeping with her two-month-old son and two other small children. The curtains and drapes caught fire but fortunately nothing more tragic occurred.