Czech skinheads' attack on Chinese unpunished

The most serious skinhead attack over the past years, an assault on a Chinese restaurant in the Prague-Nusle neighbourhood six months ago, will not be punished as the Czech police were unable to collect sufficient incrimintating evidence, the daily Hospodarske noviny (HN) writes today.

Two cooks and a waitress feared for their lives as the restaurant was assaulted by a group of about thirty skinheads who threw stones and beer mugs at it, HN writes.

However, the police have shelved the case as the perpetrator has not been found, it adds.

At first, the investigation looked hopeful. The police arrested the skinheads immediately after the attack and even learnt who masterminded the racially-motivated attack, HN writes.

However, there was no convincing evidence. "There was no clue to follow," police spokeswoman Eva Miklikova told the paper.

The broken pieces of glass injured one of the cooks. "I was afraid they came to kill us," manager Chen Wei Qi is quoted as having said.

The three Chinese found a shelter in the kitchen from where they called in the police.

The assailants tried to disappear, but the police caught them.

They found two pistols, knives and knuckledusters with them, HN writes.

However, none of them confessed to the crime, claiming they were not on the scene of the attack.

Under the law, the police had no choice but to release them. They only wrote down their names and photographed the skinheads.

The police waited for the outcome of DNA tests, but they were unconvincing, too.

"Unfortunately, the sample cannot be used. It was impossible to get the DNA from it," David Janda, head of the police anti-extremist team, said.

The Chinese personnel was unable to describe any of the skinheads, only saying most of them were in black and there were some girls among them.

There were no witnesses in the restaurant and the local closed-circuit television cameras did not register anything substantial either, HN writes.

Ondrej Cakl, who specialises in extremism, said he recognised boys who regularly attended neo-Nazi events in the group that attacked the restaurant.

Such an attack has been unusual in the Czech Republic. Czech neo-Nazis had frequently attacked foreigners in the early 1990s, mostly Vietnamese vendors.