Third Molotov cocktail found in Opava attack
Another Molotov cocktail has been found in the building on Rybářská street in Opava which was recently attacked. The bottle landed in an abandoned apartment on the first floor. Last week someone threw two other Molotov cocktails into the ground-floor entryway of the building. Police say the bottles did not shatter and did not catch fire. Kumar Vishwanathan of the Life Together association visited the building this afternoon and believes the two discoveries are related. “I believe the bottle has been there since the attack in the early morning hours of Saturday. Someone probably wanted to set the building on fire both from below and from above,” Vishwanathan told news serveru Romea.cz.
The window of the first-floor apartment was left open during the early morning hours of Saturday because the owner of the building was airing it out before renting it to new tenants. Vishwanathan said there were oil stains on the walls. He believes the wick had been lit but that it fortunately did not shatter when hitting the wall and its contents did not catch fire. “At first glance it appears to contain the same material as the bottles found in the building over the weekend,” Soňa Bradáčová, spokesperson for the Moravian-Silesian police, told news server iDNES.cz. Police officers are now determining who threw the bottle into the apartment and why.
Vishwanathan believes the tenants of the building are under great stress. “They are very afraid, not least because there is a skinhead pub nearby,” Vishwanathan said. “Very often a car pulls up and someone yells racist abuse at us. Two weeks ago we were coming home with our seven-year-old granddaughter and some guys with nightsticks flew out of a car in front of the building and threatened to beat us up,” Katel Giňa, a tenant of the building confirmed to Romea.cz. Tomorrow evening a meeting will be held between police and NGOs to seek agreement on how attacks of this kind can be prevented.
As Romea.cz has previously reported, the same building was attacked with Molotov cocktails at the end of June 2008. An unidentified perpetrator threw two Molotov cocktails into the entryway of the building, setting fire to the door of a ground-floor apartment. Tenants luckily managed to put out the fire. Not long after that attack, two assailants attempted to attack a pregnant tenant in front of the building, but she succeeded in escaping with the help of one of her relatives.
At the same time in Sadova street, which is right next to Rybarska street, local hooligans returning from a match threw a tear gas grenade into a building near the stadium. As a tenant of the building told Romea.cz, “The children had difficulty breathing, we had to move away for a few days, we had to clean up the apartment at our own expense, including painting all the rooms. Recently local thugs threw a big rock at our window.” Police never found the perpetrators of any of these attacks.
