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Old October 20th, 2010 #43
alex revision
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4 Czechs get long prison for attack on Roma family

2010-10-20

http://www.taiwannews.com.tw/etn/new...&lang=eng_news

A Czech court has convicted four right wing extremists of an arson attack on a Roma family that badly injured a 2-year-old girl, and sentenced them on Wednesday to stiff prison terms.

The four were charged with racially motivated attempted murder for an attack in April last year on a Roma, or Gypsy, family's house in the northeastern town of Vitkov.

David Vaculik, Jaromir Lukes, Ivo Mueller and Vaclav Cojocaru pleaded not guilty. They said they didn't know the house was inhabited.

Judge Miloslav Studnicka said the trial proved that their intention was to kill the Roma who lived in the house "because of their race."

The regional court in the city of Ostrava, 360 kilometers (220 miles) east of Prague, sentenced Vaculik, Lukes and Mueller to 22 years in prison each, and Cojocaru to 20 years. Beside life imprisonment, a maximum prison term in the Czech Republic is 25 years.

All four immediately appealed the verdict.

The 2-year-old girl, Natalie, suffered severe burns to 80 percent of her body and was in serious condition for months. Her parents were also hospitalized.

Natalie was battling for her life for months and doctors operated on her 14 times. She still has to be hospitalized on a short term basis and undergoes rehabilitation but it is not clear if she would ever fully recover.

Studnicka said there were three more children and two adults in the house at the time of the attack and it was pure luck that nobody was killed.

State prosecutor Brigita Bilikova had said three of the men threw Molotov cocktails into the house "to minimize a chance of inhabitants to survive."

Studnicka said the four intended the attack to mark the 120th anniversary of Adolf Hitler's birthday and to make their activities more visible within the neo-Nazi movement.

He said materials seized during home search in their homes "proved their extremist...neo-Nazi orientation."

The trial and the verdict were televised live by the Czech public television's CT24 news channel.

The court ordered the four to pay 9.4 million koruna ($531,000) in damages to Natalie, 72,000 koruna ($4,000) to her parents and 7.5 million koruna ($424,000) to a health insurance company.

Following the arson attack, the government stepped up its efforts to fight right wing extremism. In February, the country's Supreme Administrative Court banned an extremist far-right Workers Party because of its links to neo-Nazis, in the first such verdict since the fall of communism in 1989. The human rights groups also allege that the Czech Republic discriminates against the country's 250,000 Romas, who suffer from high unemployment rates within their community and are often targeted by far-right groups.