Vítkov family’s neighbors: Lights in the house could be seen at night

Today the leader of a Boy Scout group to which Vítkov arson trial defendant Václav Cojocaru belonged for several years testified in court that he had Romani friends. A teacher of two of the other defendants, Ivo Müller and David Vaculík, testified that as students they had never caused problems. The trial of last year’s arson attack on a Romani family, in which the infant Natálie suffered extensive burn injuries, is in its second week.

Jaroslava Bortlová, den mother of the scout group to which Václav Cojocaru belonged, gave her testimony just after 9 AM. She said he had attended Scout camp since the age of 10 and had always been a nice boy. He had Romani friends at the camps as well. “I know Vaška as a nice boy. He never had any problems with the other children, including the Roma. When he was a leader he even had Roma in his group. He got along with them, he was friends with them,” the leader said. Cojocaru was in Scouts until the age of 16.

The other witness was Renata Kolářová, Müller and Vaculík’s high school teacher. She said neither of them had ever caused problems and had been friendly. “Neither Ivo nor David ever had any problems with the Roma. They were friendly. I don’t know what their hobbies were. I wasn’t interested in what they did after school,” the teacher said.

The presiding judge then asked an associate judge to read for the record the initial testimony of the witness who had put the police on the arsonists’ trail. The witness, a volunteer firefighter from the Opava area, did not know the arsonists personally. He told police that on the evening of the attack he overheard a telephone call between Zuzana Osadníková and one of the arsonists. “When I heard the news about what had happened the next morning, I immediately connected it to what I had heard Zuzana and her friend discussing,” he said. Zuzana knows defendant Jaromír Lukeš. The firefighter said someone had called Zuzana and that she hadn’t wanted to talk about the call: “She just said they were going after Gypsies.”

The firefighter had been originally scheduled to testify on Wednesday, but then asked to be deposed without the defendants present. In the end, however, he refused to testify at all. On Thursday he told the judge he was afraid for his family. The judge allowed him to withdraw from testifying in court. Neither defendant Lukeš nor his attorney agreed with that decision. “I would be glad if the witness could appear and testify,” Lukeš told the judge today. Cojocaru, Müller and Vaculík had no comment to make about the original testimony.

František Bílý, the Romani family’s neighbor, appeared in court and refuted the defendants’ claims that the roof of the house had been caved in when they set it on fire. On the evening in question, Bílý’s wife woke him up at around 11:30 PM. Their neighbor had been banging on their front door to say the house was on fire and that a car had driven up and thrown Molotov cocktails through their windows. Bílý called the fire department and helped the family put the fire out. He did not hear any shouting or sounds because he did not wake up until the fire had already been set.

The defense attorneys again did their best to find discrepancies between Bílý’s original testimony to police and his testimony in court. At the attorneys’ request, the court re-read Bílý’s police testimony into the record. Another witness who lives 200 meters away from the victimized Romani family said he knew them and had never had any problems with them. He also made a very important observation: “Whenever I walked past that house in the evening, you could tell when the lights were on or when the television was on. The lights could be seen through the curtains and you could also see people’s silhouettes.” He rejected the suggestion that the family might have kept stolen goods in the house. Another neighbor, Václav Mikulenka, who lives about 80 meters from the targeted house, said he had often driven past it and seen children playing there.

The defendants’ attorneys then protested the media coverage of the trial. The hearing ended just after 11 AM and will continue on Tuesday 25 May.