Skinheads demolish Chinese cafeteria in Prague

A group of Czech skinheads broke the shop window of a Chinese cafeteria in Prague-Nusle shortly before midnight on Friday and threw two stones inside, the daily Mlada fronta Dnes (MfD) writes today.

Analyst Miroslav Mares said he considered the attack extraordinary.

"It violates the image the extremists try to create by decent and well-organised marches," Mares told the paper.

He said neo-Nazis otherwise mostly attacked groups of their peers who disagreed with their activities.

The cafeteria was already closed on Friday night, but three of its employees were sitting inside and chatting, one of them, Chen Wei Qi, said.

Chen recalled that she saw a group of young people in the square outside the shop and one of they had a beer pint glass. Shortly afterwards, the pint glass broke the window. Chen and the two male cooks who got lightly injured hid in the back of the cafeteria, the paper writes.

The skinheads threw stones in the small restaurant and walked away. The police whom Chen immediately called spotted the skinhead group several blocks away from the cafeteria. The youths had knives, brass knuckles and two pistols on them, the paper writes.

"However, nobody was arrested. The police have not succeeded in identifying the perpetrator," the paper quotes police spokesman Tomas Hulan as saying.

MfD notes that police are often helpless in similar situations because they cannot identify the individual perpetrator within a group.

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

The Nova television reported on the attack and the subsequent police intervention.

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