News

The director of Children at Risk fund Marie Vodičková says she believes sect activities and the sale of video of abused children may be behind a child abuse case linked to Barbora Škrlová, a woman who attempted to pass herself off as a young teenager. Speaking on a TV debate programme, Ms Vodičková said there were indications that Ms Škrlová had been abused herself as a child. The diminutive 33-year-old came to national attention when it was discovered that the woman at the centre of an apparent child abuse ring had attempted to adopt her in the guise of a 13-year-old girl. Ms Škrlová later enrolled in a school in Norway pretending to be a 13-year-old boy; the truth came to light after the “boy” reported having been sexually abused. She is now undergoing psychiatric tests while on remand in Brno. The strange case has attracted a great deal of attention in the Czech Republic and internationally.

A 19-year-old who put the film The Simpsons Movie on the internet illegally has reached an out-of-court settlement with its Czech distributor, the weekly Týden reported. The young man from Kaplice, south Bohemia is to pay CZK 150,000 (over USD 8,500) to Bontonfilm. He had previously been sentenced to nine months in jail and fined CZK 5.5 m but reached an agreement with the distributor after making a public apology. The head of the Czech Anti-Piracy Union, Markéta Prchalová, said the case should serve as a deterrent. The illegal appearance of The Simpsons Movie on the internet received a lot of media attention in the Czech Republic because the film came out here even before it was released in the United States.

A 32-year-old man shot himself dead during a police pursuit in the centre of Prague on Saturday morning, a police spokesperson said. The man fled when he was stopped by officers during routine checks at Masarykovo nádraží train station. He ran as far as the garages of the nearby Palladium shopping centre, where he threatened the police with a gun. After a police officer shot him in the leg the man turned the gun on himself, despite police efforts to talk him out of suicide, the spokesperson said. The incident is being investigated.

The human rights group Amnesty International held a protest against the Guantanamo Bay prison outside Prague’s American Embassy on Friday evening. Protesters dressed as prison guards brought colleagues in orange suits and handcuffs to the US Embassy in order to draw attention to the sixth anniversary of the first imprisonment at the US jail in Cuba, which has been used by Washington as part of what it calls its war on terror. The Amnesty activists called for detainees at Guantanamo to be either tried or released.