Ostrava, North Moravia, Sept 22 (CTK) – Petr Dongres, head of the squad for the president’s protection, should be fired over the Saturday incident of the Ztohoven artistic group that hung giant red boxer shorts on Prague Castle’s roof instead of the presidential flag, President Milos Zeman told reporters Tuesday.
Prague Castle is the seat of the Czechoslovak and Czech presidents where Zeman’s office is situated.
Prime Minister Bohuslav Sobotka (Social Democrats, CSSD) expressed fears that the incident at Prague Castle harmed the trust of the public and the president in his security guards.
Presidential Office spokesman Jiri Ovcacek said only Police President Tomas Tuhy can dismiss Dongress. However, this is just a technical detail, he added.
Zeman has clearly expressed his will and the police chief is expected to respect it, Ovcacek said.
Tuhy will meet Dongres on Thursday after getting acquainted with the investigation results, Police Presidium spokeswoman Jana Macalikova said.
Dongres became the chief of the president’s protection squad in the autumn of 2012. He replaced Jiri Sklenka who resigned after an airsoft gun attack on Zeman’s predecessor, Vaclav Klaus, in Chrastava, north Bohemia.
Zeman also said at the beginning of his three-day visit to the Moravia-Silesia Region that only an intelligent person can offend him.
“I do not want to comment on the three blockheads who do not even know that the presidential flag is a state symbol and it is not related to any particular president. However, the security guard has naturally failed. It means that the first consequence will be the dismissal of the director of the police squad for the Prague Castle protection,” Zeman said, adding that further personnel changes would probably follow.
The Ztohoven group, known for its provocative interferences in public affairs, released a video-recording of their Saturday “performance” at Prague Castle on Facebook. “Tuesday, the proper flag of a man who is not ashamed of anything finally flies above Prague Castle,” the group wrote on Facebook, hinting at Zeman.
The police have announced that they detained and then released three men on Saturday on suspicion of rioting and theft for which they face up to two years in prison.
On Monday, the Prague Castle security guards detained another member of the Ztohoven group on attempting to climb the scaffolding in the Castle complex again.
“This is the same group that was defecating at the National Gallery. Its name Ztohoven can be explained in two ways and the other one based on excrements is probably more precise,” Zeman said.
He hinted at the fact that the name of the group, Ztohoven, means both to get “out of it” and “a hundred pieces of shit.”
Petr Zilka, member of the artistic group, expressed surprise at the fact that the Prague Castle security guards faced a stricter punishment than the protagonists of the Saturday incident.
He said Tuesday Prague Castle as a democratic institution and a popular heritage sight should be an openly accessible place.
“It is a part of open institutions whose roofs are from time to time ascended by someone to express their views,” Zilka told reporters ahead of the Hackers Congress Parallel Polis 2015 to be held in Prague on October 2-4.
The pair of red trunks flying above the Castle was also a certain stunt promoting the congress.
The members of the Ztohoven art group have repeatedly faced criminal prosecution over their performances.
Its first well-known “performance”, Media Reality, was a fictitious nuclear explosion appearing in a Czech Television weather report programme in June 2007.
A few years later, the group’s members applied for new identities using IDs with portraits altered by morphing. They said they wanted to show how easy it was to misuse the information on people’s private data. They also released some politicians’ phone numbers at an art exhibition in Prague.
