A flag with swastika and further items featuring Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini were found with four Czech youths now tried over an arson attack on a house inhabited by Romanies last year, authorised expert Michal Mazel told the court yesterday. The four youths were active neo-Nazis. They supported other neo-Nazis now in prison and had a number of things with the Nazi theme, Mazel said. They read articles inciting for arson attacks on Romanies from the magazines they were hiding in their homes, said Mazel, who drew up an expert report on the objects found by the police in the defendants' homes. The four, David Vaculik, Jaromir Lukes, Ivo Mueller and Vaclav Cojocaru, face exceptional sentences, up to life imprisonment, if convicted of racially motivated attempted murder. Three of the suspects threw three Molotov cocktails in the windows of a Romany family house in Vitkov. Three of the house inhabitants suffered injuries in the subsequent fire. The worst afflicted was a 1.5-year-old girl Natalka, who suffered severe burns on 80 percent of her body. "These are things directly connected with both historical Nazism and modern European and global neo-Nazism," Mazel said. "They also had a number of magazines with racist and hateful texts. There were appeals to kill members of other ethnic groups as well as appeals to something similar to what happened in Vitkov," Mazel said. Lukes, Ivo Mueller and Cojocaru have confessed to the crime, but denied that it was a deliberate attack on the Romanies. They said they only wanted to burn a store of stolen things in the house.
Mazel questioned this yesterday. "I have never come across any extremists wanted to attack any storage facility. It is to be a sign of racial war that is always waged against people, an ethnic group or a hostile race," Mazel said. Authorised experts said the confiscated things unequivocally proved the defendants were intensively interested in extremist issues and that they lived for the neo-Nazi movement. "This can be primarily seen in their effort to support their imprisoned friends," Mazel said, adding that the defendants were among the worst extremists. Mazel said he had often found the symbol C18 on the things and video recordings. This is the name of a British neo-Nazi terrorist organisation. The defendants also had clothes with the number 18. Mazel said it was a visible allusion to the name of Adolf Hitler for neo-Nazis. Mazel said the found things were clearly witnessing of promotion of racial exclusiveness and xenophobic attitudes. The police found with Cojocaru a neo-Nazi magazine with the texts calling Romanies rubbish or beasts. They call for a racial purge, Mazel said. Mazel said video recordings of neo-Nazi music bands were found among the confiscated things. At the beginning of the trial Cojocaru and Mueller denied active membership of neo-Nazi cells. "I only wanted to belong somewhere," Mueller said. "I liked the fashion, the bomber jackets they wore," Cojocaru said.
Prague Monitor
