Czech Republic: Another homeless man attacked in Olomouc
On 28 June, just after 4 AM, an injured and naked homeless man was found at the entrance to a sports complex in Olomouc on 17 November Street. Municipal Police spokesperson Magda Václavíková announced the discovery yesterday.
A report that the assaulted man was lying covered in blood at the entrance to the TJ Lokomotiva Olomouc building brought patrol officers to the scene at 4:15 AM. “The man was lying naked with head injuries that were bleeding. The patrolmen called doctors and turned him over to them,” said Václavíková. The case has been taken up by the Police of the Czech Republic.
This was the third assault on a homeless person in Olomouc during the past week. During the early morning hours of Monday, several men assaulted two homeless men one after another. The total number of such assaults this year in the town now totals four.
Petr Prinz, head of the Samaritan Center for Homeless People, run by Caritas in Olomouc, told news server Romea.cz that such attacks have occurred previously, but “the media took no interest in them, no one wrote about them, and they were neither kept track of nor mapped by police.” The actual number of such cases, therefore, could be higher, as the victims do not always report the assaults to police.
Prinz did not want to speculate as to the possible perpetrators so as not to interfere with the work of the Czech Police. “We don’t want to give [right-wing] extremist groups free publicity, which is why we don’t want to make statements to the media about these cases,” he said.
In a brief statement published on the Facebook profile and website of Caritas Olomouc, the staff of that organization has expressed how disturbed they are by these incidents. “We consider violence committed against persons who are asleep, drunk, or physically weak to be a glaring manifestation of barbarism that deserves radical punishment. Life is not a war game. We would like to remind the aggressors that they themselves may soon end up in the same place themselves.”
