Romani women and children in Slovakia assaulted physically and verbally by stranger at a lake

The JOJ television channel in Slovakia has reported that an unidentified man is said to have assaulted a group of Romani women and their children both physically and verbally in the eastern village of Kalinov; the youngest child in the group is just four years old and has congenital cerebral palsy. The four women and their 10 children had wanted to spend a pleasant afternoon by the lakeside but were attacked out of the blue by a young man whom they did not know, first verbally and then physically. 

The man is said to have been angered by litter on the lakeshore that had nothing to do with the group. "Somebody had been barbecuing there the day before and there were broken alcohol bottles and cans left behind," one of the women described the incident to the TV channel. 

"He came up to us demanding that we clean it up. He shouted horrible vulgarities," the woman told a reporter for JOJ. 

"'G*psy filth'" was one of the insults, she said. The women are said to have politely told the man the trash was not theirs. 

The man then physically attacked the entire group. "I don't know what kind of person he was," one of the women told the JOJ reporter. 

"First he assaulted my sister, then my daughter, then the rest of us and our children," she described, saying the man used some kind of big stick. "He shoved me twice, and my daughter and I ended up in the fire pit."

"I was in a horrible state of shock. I didn't know what to do, I was shouting," the woman told the reporter.

Two other visitors to the lake stood up for the Romani women, only to also become targets of the aggressive man's attack, and he proceeded to break three of the Romani women's telephones and throw their things in the water. The victims of his rampage sustained abrasions, bruises and scratches, and one of the Romani women sustained an injured shoulder requiring her to take disability leave from her job.

"In the case of the injured party who is said to have sustained an injury that will take 42 days to heal, according to the preliminary medical report, we have begun a criminal proceedings for a personal injury offense," police spokesperson Petra Kováčiková told the television channel. As for the other injured parties, the police are calling the matter a misdemeanor against civic coexistence.