“I can confirm that some of the people we now have in custody were directly at the burning of the building in Pardubice,” Štěpánek outlined on Tuesday. At the same time, the group also includes those who only helped the arsonists and were not at the scene of the crime, as the defenders of two of them claim.
The fire broke out in the Pardubice industrial area early in the morning on Friday, March 20. He destroyed the hall and seriously damaged the adjacent administrative building of the arms company LPP Holding, which produces, among other things, drones for Ukraine. Damage is estimated at several hundred million crowns.
The alleged anti-Israel group Earthquake Faction, which announced its intention to attack the production of weapons for Israel, claimed responsibility for the fire. A few years ago, LPP Holding announced that it wanted to manufacture and develop drones in Pardubice together with the Israeli company Elbit Systems. However, according to LPP Holding, the cooperation never started.
The case was taken up by the National Center against Terrorism, Extremism and Cybercrime (NCTEKK). Initially, there was talk of a search for nine suspects, in the end ten of them ended up in handcuffs, five of them in the Czech Republic, three in Poland and one each in Bulgaria and Slovakia, while from the last two mentioned countries they were already transferred to Czech prisons. At the moment, according to Štěpánek, it is a complete list of possible perpetrators and their collaborators.
“There is no targeted search for any specific person at the moment. The police are of course checking the contacts of the suspects to see if other people cooperated with them, but otherwise the number of detainees is final at this stage,” said Štěpánek, who did not rule out that the number of suspects could increase.
Detectives from NCTEKK originally worked with four different variants of the attack, but they lean towards the one most often mentioned. “We are working with several versions, but the most likely one is still that they were pro-Palestinian and anti-Israeli activists, which is confirmed by the evidence so far,” the Prague chief prosecutor confirmed to Novinkám.
They will not bring anyone from Poland
Of the seven accused who ended up in Czech remand prisons, at least two have Czech citizenship, the rest are foreigners, often with American passports. The police accused them of a terrorist attack and of participating in a terrorist group, for which they face 12 to 20 years in prison.
Another three people ended up behind bars in Poland. They are local citizens, two men and one woman. Criminals suspect the woman and one of the men of helping to start the fire. According to the Polish media, the second man entrusted other people with the purchase of items that could be used to set fire to the Pardubice hall.
On Monday, information appeared in the media referring to the Czech police presidium that Poland will hand over the last three suspects to the Czech Republic for criminal prosecution within a few weeks. However, Štěpánek denied it on Tuesday, saying that such a transfer is not on the agenda and that the presidium “overshot it a bit” with this information.
“The Polish side would have to request the transfer of criminal prosecution to the Czech Republic, but we have no request here yet, and our supervising prosecutor has not even discussed it with his Polish colleagues. It is definitely not going to happen now,” Štěpánek pointed out.
Arson attack in Pardubice
On Friday, March 20, a fire broke out in the storage hall of the LPP Holding armory in Pardubice. The group Earthquake Faction, which presents itself as a defender of the Palestinians, applied for its establishment.
