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Vítkov arson trial: Summary of the first week

22 October 2012
7 minute read

The trial of four young men charged with racially motivated attempted murder began a week ago at the Regional Court in Ostrava. A little girl not quite two years old almost burned to death during the arson attack on a Romani family during the night of 18 April. An aggravating circumstance for the defendants is the fact that the single-family home which they attacked in the Silesian town of Vítkov housed more than seven people, including children under 15. If found guilty the defendants face exceptional sentencing, including the possibility of life in prison.

It would be difficult to find another case in the Czech justice system where the court has set aside 29 days over the course of two months for a trial, but that is the case with this one. The schedule calls for only two breaks of a few days in June. Otherwise the trial is to be held without interruption every day until the verdict is announced. This is an indication of the significance of the case for the justice system here.

A three-member panel of judges, presided over by Regional Judge Miloslav Studnička, opened the trial on 11 May 2010 by asking whether the victims were present. Pavel Kudrik, father of burn victim Natálka, responded that he was present and sat down in front next to the attorneys-in-fact for the victims and state prosecutor Brigita Bilíková, who read a summary of the indictment. Bilíková says there is enough evidence to show the defendants carefully planned their crime, prepared it, and carried it out with the intention of killing people. She also considers it proven that the house was attacked by neo-Nazis who were motivated by racism. In her view, the defendants knew a Romani family with small children lived in the house and that was why it was selected as a target.

After the indictment was read, the attorneys-in-fact for the victims estimated the monetary value of the damages caused the family and moved that the court include as part of its verdict the obligation for those convicted to compensate the family. The health insurance company had already joined the proceedings on compensating the damages with a claim of roughly CZK 8 million, a number which will increase due to the need for further operations on Natálka during the course of the proceedings. Prague-based attorney Pavel Uhl estimated the damages caused to the family’s children at roughly CZK 9 million, while the attorneys-in-fact for the parents are asking for not quite one million crowns.

Natálka’s parents told the media they are not concerned about the money. They are convinced they will never see a crown from the perpetrators. Markus Pape and Ladislav Baláž, their attorneys-in-fact, emphasized that the aim of the compensation requests was to show the degree to which the victims were harmed by the attack. The only way to achieve that is to estimate the damages caused on and request the court award compensation for damages as part of the sentencing.

Jiří Lukeš and David Vaculík announced they would be making use of their legal right not to testify. Ivo Müller, on the other hand, testified at the advice of his attorney. When the judge asked why he had committed the crime, he claimed to have had information that the house to be attacked was a storehouse for stolen goods and said he did not know it was occupied by a Romani family. In response to a question from the attorney-in-fact for victim Pavel Kudrik, Natálka’s father, he explained they wanted to destroy a “Roma” storehouse and had never attacked any other storehouse before. In the past he allegedly had problems with some Roma in the place where he lives.

Müller also admitted that he and his friends had traveled to the other end of the country to attend a Workers’ Party meeting in Litvínov, and when the meeting was over, they had marched on the Janov housing estate. When asked what went on there, he answered that while some of the marchers had thrown stones at police officers, he did no such thing, although he also did not help any of the police officers who were so attacked. Why was he there? Because everyone else was. When the attorney-in fact asked him how many hours he had spent at Janov, his attorney objected that the question was irrelevant to the Vítkov attack and that her client did not have to answer it. The judge then asked the attorney-in –fact to change his topic. Müller had wanted to improve his position by testifying, but it did not help his case much. On the advice of his attorney he decided not to testify further.

On the second day of the trial, Václav Cojocaru, the youngest defendant, started out willing to testify and to answer all questions. He also claimed to have participated in the attack under the impression that they were just going to destroy a storehouse of stolen goods. He had the impression the house was falling apart already. More than once he used the phrase “I was told” when asked to explain why he participated in the crime, as if he had been carrying out someone’s orders. However, he did not say what those orders were or why he never asked what they were about.

When his attorney asked him whether he had ever participated in any events where Czechs and Roma were together, Cojocaru at first confirmed that he had also been in Litvínov when the famous “battle of Janov” took place. His attorney then asked him to talk about the children’s camps he had worked at, where allegedly there was no difference between Czech and Romani children and where he had treated everyone the same as a leader. When the attorney discovered his client did not know how to answer correctly, he advised him not to testify further.

Cojocaru and Müller charged their co-defendants Lukeš and Vaculík with organizing the entire incident. When the judge unexpectedly ended the hearing shortly after lunch, Lukeš and Vaculík’s attorneys objected that they had been denied the opportunity to call those claims into question or refute them.

On the morning of the third day, the judge adjourned the hearing until the next week, saying he had to unexpectedly handle another case which was said to be urgent. Lukeš and Vaculík’s attorneys charged him with violating the rules of procedure to their clients’ detriment. However, the judge said it was the attorneys’ job to convince their clients to testify and contribute to clarifying the facts of the case in that way. When the defendants’ testimonies from the preliminary proceedings were read into the record, it turned out that the inspiration for the whole incident was to “go after Gypsies.” This showed that the destruction of some storehouse had not been the top priority and that all of the defendants had to have presumed that people would be the target of their attack.

The court adjourned until Monday, when it continued with the reading of Cojocaru’s preliminary testimony into the record. Once again, all of the defendants refused to testify. On Tuesday the defendants’ friends will testify. On Thursday the victims – Natálka’s parents and grandparents – are to testify. Should the judge find the confessions made by three of the defendants during the preliminary proceedings to be reliable, he may already have proof that the defendants intended to commit murder for racist reasons.

At the request of the attorney-in-fact for Pavel Kudrik, the news server iDNES.cz called on the public in mid-May to provide any old photographs they might have of the family’s home prior to the fire so the claims made by some of the defendants as to the allegedly deteriorated state of the house might be evaluated. The defendants allegedly could not have imagined anyone was living in the house due to its state of repair. Investigators have not succeeding in finding any photographs of the house before the fire.

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