Murder of Sudanese student in the Czech Republic 25 years ago moved the public to protest racism
Exactly 25 years ago, on 8 November 1997, politicians and the public were moved to combat racism by the murder of a Sudanese student at the University of Economics in Prague Hassan Elamin Abdelradi. Demonstrations against racism were attended by thousands and politicians demanded a ban on the skinhead movement.
The entire case began at about 2:30 AM when the skinheads Jan Schimperk (age 16) and Petr Zborník (age 18) assaulted two students from Sudan at a disco on Biskupcova Street in Prague. The skinheads shouted racist insults at the students and threatened to kill them.
Abdelradi ran to the nearby dormitory, Jarov, to hide. Zborník chased him and first encountered student Adbul Karim on the dormitory grounds, attacking him with a knife and cutting the tendons in his hand. He then ran into Abdelradi and stabbed him twice in the abdomen.
Abdelradi died as a result of his injuries. He had already been assaulted four months prior to that fateful night, again by racists.
The fact that people of color were regularly attacked during the 1990s was also confirmed by Abdelradi’s girlfriend at the time. “In Prague, a white woman could not walk down the street with a Black man and take public transportation without hearing at least one insult per day,” she recalled in an interview for news server TÝDEN.CZ.
In those days, the people harmed by such attacks did not report them to the police, who would belittle such complaints in any event. “An acquaintance of mine, a very delicate Black man, was assaulted in Moravia by several skinheads at once. He reported the matter to the police, but their investigation found that he had attacked them, and while they were defending themselves against him, he broke his own glasses, tore his own clothing and destroyed his own personal stuff,” the woman gave as an example.
Demonstrations against racism
The 1997 case sparked a great deal of agitation. Roughly 10,00 people gathered in front of the University of Economics on Winston Churchill Square in Prague on 10 November.
The then-chair of the Czech Social Democratic Party (ČSSD), Miloš Zeman, who was the president of the Chamber of Deputies, said at the demonstration that he had asked the Legislative Council to prepare the background materials necessary to outlawing the skinhead movement. Several other top politicians spoke at that demonstration, including ministers, such as Jindřich Vodička, Ivan Pilip, Josef Lux and Michael Žantovský, president of the Senate Petr Pithart, and the Czech Catholic priest, philosopher, and theologian Tomáš Halík.
The head of the Christian Democrats (KDU-ČSL), Josef Lux, and the chair of the Senate, Petr Pithart, said they were in favor of banning the skinheads. “I am absolutely shocked, absolutely overwhelmed, and I am scared of the skinhead movement,” then-Prime Minister Václav Klaus told the media at the time.
Racially-motivated murder gets 13.5 years
Zborník confessed to the murder, but said his actions had not been motivated by race; neither the police nor the courts believed him. The Municipal Court in Prague convicted him on 23 March 1998 of racially-motivated murder and battery and sentenced him to 14.5 years in a maximum-security prison.
Schimperk, the other skinhead, was sentenced to seven and a half months in juvenile prison without the possibility of parole. He contributed to the attack by threatening to kill one of the foreign nationals while brandishing an iron chain.
Both defendants appealed. The High Court reduced Zborník’s sentence in September 1998 to 13.5 years in prison and gave Schimperk turned his seven and a half month sentence into a suspended one.
