Prague, Sept 16 (CTK) – A Czech court found five young men guilty of neo-Nazism promotion, imposing a three-year prison sentence on one of them and suspended sentences on the other four for supporting the Wotan Jugend Russian neo-Nazi organisation yesterday.
According to the indictment, the five men assisted in the establishment of the Wotan Jugend Czech cell by which they committed a crime of supporting movements aimed at suppression of human rights and freedoms.
The defendants deny the charges of extremism promotion. They say they were only selling stickers with the movement’s symbols.
The verdict has not taken effect yet as they have taken time for considering their appeal with the Prague Municipal Court.
The district court has ruled that the men’s own testimonies, wire-taping of their phones as well as the items promoting neo-Nazism and Hitler’s Germany, seized during home searches, proved their guilt of neo-Nazism promotion.
Russian Sergei Busygin, 22, with a permanent residence in the Czech Republic, who brought the Wotan Jugend ideas to the Czech Republic, was given a three-year suspended sentence.
Czechs Vojtech Hajek, 24, and Lukas Kolumpek, 23, were given a two-year suspended sentence, while Marcel Palacky, 19, was given a 18-month suspended sentence.
The fifth defendant, Czech Daniel Houdek, 21, was escorted from prison where he was serving a sentence for racially motivated violence. The court sent him to prison for three years in view of his previous criminal activities. He was tried in court six times in the past.
According to the indictment, Busygin was spreading the movement’s flag and music connected with it in the ultra-right circles in the Czech Republic. He also arranged the production and sale of the movement’s stickers and promoted it at a May Day rally of the extremist Workers’ Party of Social Justice (DSSS) in Prerov, north Moravia, in 2013.
The police busted the Czech cell of Wotan Jugend last May after a long investigation.
The Wotan Jugend movement was founded by members of the Moloth band in Russia in 2008. It is to provide ideological, promotional and financial support to prisoners convicted of crimes with racial, ethnic, national and similar motives.
Wotan Jugend gains money for its activities by the sale of clothing, stickers, CDs and other items with the movement’s motive or Moloth’s emblem and by staging concerts, sports events and public fund-raising campaigns.
